


For Want of a Nail

by MeridianGrimm



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Rewrite, Fix-It, Gen, No Incest, Rated T for swearing, Sibling Bonding, Some Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2019-11-28 18:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18212255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeridianGrimm/pseuds/MeridianGrimm
Summary: A mistake at the Commission sends Five into the Vietnam War on assignment, where he runs into Klaus.  Armed with a briefcase that the Commission can’t connect to him and just enough foreknowledge to give him an edge, Five travels to 2019 along with Klaus’ partner Dave to work with his siblings on preventing the end of the world.





	1. T-minus ?? Days to the Apocalypse

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to [lisatelramor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisa_Telramor), my good friend who was kind enough to read through a draft of this for me. All remaining spelling and grammar errors are mine.
> 
> The title is from the [proverb and fictional trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForWantOfANail) of the same name, which demonstrates that small changes can have a ripple effect.

> _For an agency that has all the time in the world, the Commission requires their employees to put in a staggering_ _number of hours per day.  Darla Walding, the case manager for all wars of the twentieth century, rechecks the last sentence of her orders before tucking the rolled document into a brass cylinder for delivery.  She blinks a few times, yawns, and takes a long sip of her coffee.  Checking the clock for the third time in as many minutes, Darla sets her mug back down on the sticky-backed label paper to her right, smearing a crucial number on the form.  She peels the label and smooths it onto the brass cylinder before strolling down the hall and handing her orders off to Gloria.  The single most vital cog in the Commission’s machine reads the label on the tube and, instead of sending the instructions through tube 75 to the temporal assassin monitoring the 1960s in Vietnam, paces down to the end of the first row and slots the cylinder into the pneumatic tube with a large, bolded “5” stamped clearly on the pipe._

* * *

Five Hargreeves blinks as he adjusts to the sunlight in the A Shau Valley.  His last assignment in London had been disgustingly wet and for the first time in days he can feel the chill leech away from his bones.  It’s warm enough in Vietnam to roll his sleeves up, so he does.  The coordinates in Five’s instructions put him about a hundred meters from the camp where his target is healing up from shrapnel in his shoulder.  Five makes quick work of the distance, checking his weapon again even though he’d done it by habit as soon as he landed in the valley.

He straightens his shoulders and enters the camp like he belongs there, skirting around a few trucks and nodding at soldiers moving in the other direction.  He goes completely unacknowledged until he passes the mess tent and two soldiers crash right into him on their way out.

“Sorry, sir,” the first says, taking a step back.

“Watch where you’re walking.”

The second raises his hands in a gesture of surrender.  “Hey, man, we didn’t mean anything by it.  Our bad.”

Five opens his mouth to tell him exactly where he can shove his apology when he sees a heart-stoppingly familiar black umbrella on the man’s arm.  He hears a sharp gasp and realizes that it came from him.  “You.”  He reaches out and grabs the man’s arm.  “Why do you have that umbrella tattoo?”

The man steps back, but doesn’t get far with Five’s hand on him.  His gaze drops down to where Five’s sleeves are rolled up and a much-faded match of the tattoo is on display.  “Why do I – wait, why do _you_ have that umbrella tattoo?”

“Time travel,” Five realizes with a snap, and this isn’t Allison or Vanya, so it’s either Luther or Diego or – “Klaus?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

Five drops his arm.  “I’m your brother, you idiot.”

“You – wait – _Five_ _?_ ”  Klaus looks him over.  “Holy shit.  How long has it been for you?”

“It’s been forty-five years since I left home.  You?”

“I got here nine months ago.”

Five slides a glance over to the other soldier.  “Can we talk alone?”

“Yeah, sure, right.  Uhhh, Dave, this is my brother Five, long story.  I think we’re gonna go catch up?”  Dave still looks confused, but nods.  Klaus gestures Five to follow him away from the mess tent and towards a smaller tent where he must be bunking.

Klaus barely checks to make sure the tent is empty before spinning around to face Five.  “So, what are you doing here?  And how did you land the right way this time and not get fucked up in a tornado of spacetime?”

“I’m impressed, Klaus, you have such a clear and precise grasp of the intricacies of time travel.”

Klaus laughs and moves over towards one of the cots, sitting down and patting the spot next to him.  Five ignores the invitation but sets his briefcase by the edge of the cot.  “It really is you, isn’t it?  C’mon, how did you get here looking like that?”

“I came from the future.  It’s shit, by the way.”

“Like I said, called it.”

Five frowns at the first part of that, but he lets it go in favor of bigger questions.  “What I’m more interested in is how _you_ got here.  Last I checked, time travel wasn’t in your repertoire.”

“I have – well it was – there were a very confusing set of events that led to yours truly being drop-kicked into 1968, but the shortest answer is that I got kidnapped in 2019.  Two creepy-looking assassins were searching for you.”

His eyebrows jump.  “They were looking for me?  In 2019?”  It would have to have been early 2019, before the apocalypse in April.

“Yeah, you dropped in at Dad’s funeral, but you looked like you were thirteen again.  And there was something about the apocalypse, but I gotta be honest, I missed a bunch of what you were saying.  In my defense, I was very high.”

Five pinches the bridge of his nose.  “I think you’re going to need to start at the beginning.”

* * *

It takes Klaus about twenty minutes to answer all of Five’s questions – and this old dude definitely _is_ Five, because no one else can hit the intersection of “shrewd”, “cranky”, and “irritating” quite like Five.  Who would have guessed that they’d run into each other twenty years before they were born?  This is a pretty wild thing to have happened, even considering that Klaus had seen little Five less than a year ago.

“So, where’s the briefcase?” Five asks when Klaus concludes his tale.

“Right here.”  Klaus reaches under his cot and drags it out from where he’d covered it in an extra blanket.  Five nods to himself and folds his hands together, tilting his head thoughtfully as he stares at the black briefcase.  After a few moments with no response, Klaus ventures, “It looks a lot like yours.”  Five remains silent.  “Are you – what they were?  Some kind of time-travelling hitman?”

“Your briefcase isn’t signed out to me,” Five says, ignoring Klaus’ question.  “That means I could make any number of unauthorized trips and the Commission would never connect them back to me.  It would be on the heads of those temporal assassins we apparently ran afoul of in 2019, Hazel and Cha-Cha.  It would almost serve them right.”

“Okay, I’ll bite.  Unauthorized trips?”

“I’ve been biding my time trying to calculate the way back to the 21st century.  Using my powers, that is.  Any unauthorized time-travel with the company equipment is punishable by… well, you don’t want to know.  I want to stop the apocalypse, and I have to be in 2019 to do it.”

“So you’re saying that if you use this briefcase instead of yours, you can just push some buttons on this thing and take us home?”

“Yes.  We’ll hop to a random place in the right year, destroy the briefcase, and then I can jump us home.  It’ll give us some more breathing room from whoever the Commission sends to track down the briefcase and us.”

“Hey, if we’re making plans to leave, I need to talk to my boyfriend,” Klaus realizes.

“What’s-his-name who was with you before?”

“His name is David Katz.  Dave.  And yeah, I can’t just disappear without telling him that I might never be back.  I’ve been on the other end of that and it sucks.”  Five looks away and neither of them decide to go down that conversational rabbit-hole.  “Maybe he could come with us.  Or I could stay.”

“Talk to him if you must.  I need to plan.”  Five pulls out an extremely worn copy of _Extra-Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven_ and starts writing.

* * *

Dave Katz doesn’t know what he was expecting when Klaus brought him to join in on the discussion with his older brother Five, but a conversation about _time travel_ and the _actual apocalypse_ certainly wasn’t it.  He and the others in their unit know some of Klaus’ strangeness.  Klaus asks odd questions about technology and slang and sometimes he talks to people that no one else can see.  Being submerged in the middle of a war, they’d quickly made the connection that Klaus could speak to the dead, which was especially unfortunate under the circumstances.  Klaus had talked about it a little when they’d asked, but he obviously didn’t like it.

After Klaus explains the whole situation as far as he knows it, Dave sits back.  “So you’re leaving?”

Klaus’ face falls.  “I – maybe.  I could come back with the briefcase, once the apocalypse is fixed.  Or you could – you know.”  Come with them.

Dave’s instinctive reaction is to refuse, because time travel sounds wildly dangerous and unpredictable.  But then, it’s not like Vietnam is any different.  Dave thinks about what he’d be leaving behind: he’s already lost his brother to the war, his father passed from illness when Dave was a child, and his mother doesn’t want a gay man for a son.  His friends back home got hauled to Vietnam same as him, and Dave is painfully aware that in war there are no guarantees.

“I just don’t know,” he says.  “I want to help you, Klaus, and your brother too, of course, but this time – it’s where I have roots.  I can’t even begin to imagine what the year 2019 looks like.”  Klaus nods wearily and there’s silence for a few moments except for the scratching of Five’s pen.  “Your brother doesn’t talk much,” Dave ventures.

“Oh, don’t be fooled, he’s just scheming right now.  Five is anything but shy with his opinions.”

“Pot, kettle,” Five says absently, still scribbling away.  Then, after two more minutes he sits up straight and looks up at the two of them.  “Alright.  I’ve been considering which day in 2019 we need to return to.  We need to make it so there aren’t two of me running around, because on that road lies paradoxes.  It wasn’t a problem when I was in the Commission’s corrections division, because my contracts never took place within the hundred years following the year I was born.”  He points at Klaus.  “What that means is, I can’t just jump back with the two of you to the day you left, five days before the apocalypse.  It has to be the beginning, before the older version of me tries to jump back under my own power and drops out of the sky stuck as a teenager.”

Dave tries to figure out if that makes sense and decides that the man with years of time travel experience under his belt probably knows better.

* * *

Klaus reaches for Dave’s hand as Five continues, “I, right now, am younger than the Five who jumps back in time on my own, so if I use your briefcase, then older-me will never make that jump.  Klaus, you were already at Dad’s funeral, though, so I can’t take you back. I absolutely refuse to deal with two of you, for reasons other than paradoxes.”

“That’s fair.”

Dave clears his throat.  “I’ll go with you, Mr. Five.”  Klaus’ head snaps around, surprised after Dave’s hesitance earlier.  “I realize that, well, if this is happening, then you’re going to change the timeline so that – so that Klaus never comes to 1968.  And rather than lose all of that for good –” He looks at Klaus with his lips curling up in a familiar, beautiful smile “– I think I want a chance.  I know it’s a big risk, but I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Klaus is torn between joy and heartbreak.  On the one hand, Dave is kind and strong and willing to risk everything for Klaus, something that no one else has ever done.  On the other hand, though, if this happens, Klaus will lose all of the memories that they made together here.  “When you show up to Dad’s funeral, I won’t know you.”

Dave pulls his hand over and kisses it.  “I’ll charm you again.”

“My family sucks and I’m kind of – a _lot_ of – a mess.  More than I have been here.”

“Then I’ll take my time.  We’ll get dinner and go dancing, or whatever the custom is in 2019.  See a movie.  Adopt a cat.  Whatever you want.  And I’ll tell you everything about our time here after the apocalypse is called off.”

Klaus takes his partner’s face in his hands.  “God, I love you.”

“I’m still right here,” Five says.

“Don’t ruin the moment, Five.”

* * *

Five reprograms the briefcase while Klaus and Dave say their goodbyes.

“And don’t let those creepy assassins follow you,” Klaus orders Five, which reminds him –

“Right, we have one more thing to do before Dave and I paint targets on our backs.”  Five flips one of his knives out of its sheath with his left hand and cuts into his right arm.

“Hey! What the fuck, old man?”

“Tracking device from the Commission.  I almost forgot about it.”  He digs under his skin and pulls out the locator, dropping it into the dirt and crushing it with the heel of his shoe.

“Well, is there anything else you forgot before we put the fate of the world in your hands?”

Five shoots him a nasty glare.  “We’re good now.”

“Bye then.  I’ll see you in a few minutes, I guess.”

“Take care, Klaus.”  Five holds out the briefcase to Dave, who puts his hands on either side of it.  Five throws both latches at the same time, watches the blue light surround them both –

And they jump.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are some things about the canon timeline that Klaus didn't mention -- not because he wanted to hide things, but because Five didn't ask. For example, Klaus doesn't recount the debate about shutting Grace off because Five has other priorities, and besides, Klaus didn't think they should turn her off anyway. And of course, Klaus can't tell Five about events from the canon timeline that he didn't know.
> 
> Comments are much appreciated!! I'm curious about what you all think is going to change.


	2. T-minus 8 Days to the Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Throughout the fic, you will notice some familiar lines and events from the show, but things go off the rails pretty quickly. I tried to balance dialogue and summary for conversations that remain the same. There are some instances where I kept in canon lines, while in other places I condensed long chunks into a quick description to avoid boring you with repetition. Let me know how it worked for you.
> 
> In the spirit of full disclosure, I want to be clear that Dave isn't the main character of this fic (more’s the pity), though he will definitely get plenty of screen-time with Klaus. I wanted him in the present because 1) Klaus deserves a good partner who loves him and 2) Dave is more well-adjusted than the rest of them. His presence does change a couple of things.

Dave feels like someone shoved the contents of an entire pillow up his nose and into his brain.  His head is fuzzy and full and achy and he staggers on the uneven, unfamiliar forest terrain.  “Where are we?”

“Halfway across the country from where we need to be.”  Klaus’ (sort of older) brother draws a gun and aims it at the discarded time machine.  He studies the briefcase and Dave waits as ten and then twenty seconds pass.

“Do you want me to…?”

That seems to snap him out of his thoughts.  “No, I’m not looking to leave this time.  This is it.”

“It’s do or die, huh?” Dave says quietly.

“Somebody may die, but not me, and not the world.  According to Klaus, the Commission will send Hazel and Cha-Cha after us, but ditching the briefcase and getting the hell out of here will buy us some time.”  He punctuates the sentence with three shots to the briefcase, causing blue sparks and a sizzling sound.  “One advantage is that they won’t be looking for me specifically.”

Dave winces as something occurs to him.  “Except for the fact that you cut out your tracker just as another time machine went rogue.”  Or maybe linear time doesn’t work like that for time travel agencies.

“Shit.  Fuck.  I had it all worked out.”  Five kicks the closest tree, which seems like a childish act for a nearly sixty-year-old man.  “Okay, that’s a problem, but I’ll deal with it later.  Let’s get to the Academy before they show up here.”  He exhales heavily.  “We’re going to do this in three shorter jumps, or else I’ll black out when we get there.”  He reaches out for Dave’s hand.  “Hold tight, Katz.”

* * *

On the last jump, Five aims for the mansion’s courtyard and smacks directly into a statue that wasn’t there in 2002.  “ _Fucking shit!_ ”  He staggers back and clutches his head, which is also still aching from the time travel hangover and three long-distance jumps in a row.  “Christ on a cracker!”  He looks up at the statue to see the name “Ben Hargreeves” carved there and shit, he’s not going to deal with this right now on top of everything else.  Five shoves his grief down in favor of other, more productive thoughts, like what he’s going to say to the rest of his siblings after what was seventeen years for them.

“I think they know we’re here,” Dave says (unhelpfully, in Five’s opinion) as noises from inside the house indicate that people are moving around in response to Five’s shouting.

The double doors to the house open to reveal first Diego, then Vanya, then Luther and Allison and Klaus.  Five doesn’t consider himself sentimental by any means but it’s still so good to see them here, alive, and not buried in the rubble of their home.

* * *

Vanya watches as an older man in a gray suit steps forward.  Despite the head wound, he looks less disoriented than his companion, who’s glancing around the courtyard with open curiosity.

“Don’t bother,” the man says when Luther steps forward menacingly.  “I’m not going to start a fight.”  He holds out his arm, revealing a faded black tattoo that Vanya instantly recognizes.  “At least, not until I’ve been home for a few more minutes.”

“Five,” Vanya breathes, shocked.

“Got it in one.”

Luther relaxes but doesn’t move back.  “Can you prove it?”  The man jumps a handful of meters to the left in a single step and the accompanying _bamf_ sound strikes a familiar chord in Vanya’s memory.

“Okay, that’s pretty conclusive, but who’s that?” Diego asks, gesturing behind Five at the younger man.

“That’s a long story.  Currently, I’m here because someone scheduled the apocalypse and I’m going to stop it.  Oh yes, and Klaus, I brought your partner from a timeline where you tripped face-first into the 1960s.  No need to thank me.”

“Dave Katz,” the younger man says with a small wave and a smile.

“Holy shit,” Klaus says from beside Vanya.  “Dad’s dead, Five is back, and my brother brought me a boyfriend.  This is the best day ever.”

* * *

The rest of the Hargreeves and Dave follow Five into the kitchen like ducklings.  Five grabs the bread without thinking and then wonders if there are still marshmallows on the shelf above the stove.  He checks: yes, there are, and the peanut butter is still stored in the same spot too.  Home sweet home, indeed.

“You said something about the apocalypse?” Luther prompts.

Delores would tell him that this is what Five gets for satisfying the urge to show up his siblings.  He’d made an appropriately dramatic entrance, but now he has to deal with the consequences of mentioning his mission.  “Don’t worry about it.  I’m handling things.”

There are several protests to this around the table, which Five ignores, but then Dave speaks up: “Well, I can tell you what we know.”

“You don’t know all of it.”

“I think he should share,” Luther challenges.

Klaus leans forward on the table and throws in his two cents too.  “Yeah, let’s hear it from someone who can communicate like a normal human being.”

“Pot, kettle,” Five retorts for the second time in as many days.

“You might as well tell us, Five,” Diego states, idly sharpening his knives in his seat.  “We’re not going to drop this, and if there’s a disaster headed our way, we should all be prepared.”

Five rubs his temples.  “God, fine, I’ll tell you about my plans to stop the apocalypse if it gets you all to shut up.  It sounds like G.I. Joe here is gonna tell you anyway, and I’m not going to risk you all connecting the dots wrong and haring off in the wrong direction.”  He takes a steadying breath.  “However, I want to make it very clear right now that I’m the one in charge of this investigation – don’t start, Luther.  You idiots are not going to screw this up for me.”

Klaus chuckles.  “The brother we all missed, ladies and gentlemen.”

Five outlines what he found in the future and the years he spent in the apocalypse.  He briefly touches on his employment with the Commission, skimming over the details of his work because Luther and Diego (if not the others) will have some moral concerns about his job as a temporal assassin.  Then, Five moves into his arrival in Vietnam and the information he’d learned from that timeline’s Klaus about the first go-round of apocalypse prevention.  He describes what he knows about MeriTech, Hazel and Cha-Cha, and Klaus’ kidnapping.

“Dibs on MeriTech,” Diego announces as soon as Five exhausts his knowledge.  “I’ve got a friend on the force who can tell me if the cops suspect anything sketchy going on there.”

“I know this is going to sound strange,” Allison says slowly, “but all of this reminds me of what Dad always said.  About why he formed the Umbrella Academy in the first place.  He claimed that he was worried about the fate of the world, said that things were changing.  Do you think maybe he knew that something was coming?”

Luther sits up straighter.  “It’s possible.  Like I said before, I think we should look into his death too.  There are some suspicious points I want to clear up.”

Jesus, Luther needs to rearrange his priorities.  But whatever.  “Do what you want.  I wasn’t planning to ask you all for help.”

“Either way,” Allison points out, “some of us could look through Dad’s notes and see whether he had any hints about the apocalypse or someone targeting him.  I’d be willing to work on it.”  Predictably, Luther offers to join her.

Five takes a breath to organize his thoughts.  “Okay.  Alright.  This is a start.  Let’s take a ten-minute break, then do the funeral, and then reconvene later.”  That way, Five can get something in his stomach and see if the bar is stocked.  If he’s going to be herding his siblings at the same time as running the investigation, he’s going to need a drink.

* * *

Vanya finds Five on the couch with a glass of Bordeaux, staring up at the portrait of himself at thirteen.  They talk about Dad, and then her book, surprisingly, which Five compliments in his roundabout way.  Vanya imagines Five sitting in the rubble of a ruined library, reading whatever hadn’t been crushed during the unexplained, world-shattering explosion that had ended all other life on Earth.

She swallows the lump in her throat.  “Was it bad?” she asks quietly, unintentionally echoing his question about Ben, and Five’s face changes as he intuits the direction of her thoughts.  He’d described the post-apocalyptic world so clinically in the kitchen, but Vanya can’t imagine it was anything but terrifying for the child he’d been.

“It was bad,” Five confirms.  “But, if you must know… it was nice to have something about the rest of you.  To know what happened after I left.  Newspapers and comic books were too fragile to survive.”

“Then it was worth doing.”

There had been a long stretch near the end where thirteen-year-old Five hadn’t smiled at all – too busy with his research on time travel to bother with anything else – but the expression he turns towards Vanya now is pretty close.

* * *

Dave has survived this long by learning to roll with life’s punches, but he feels a little overwhelmed as he stands at a funeral in 2019 for a man whose only vocal mourner is the talking monkey, Pogo.  Klaus’ family just keeps getting stranger and stranger.  None of that changes Dave’s feelings, of course, but it certainly makes him wonder if time travel is even in the top ten weirdest things that have ever happened to Klaus Hargreeves.  It’s a little sad to think, but also hopeful too: there may be things in his past that were strange in a good way.  After months of knowing very little about Klaus’ history, this opportunity is one he doesn’t want to waste.

After Pogo’s speech there’s a fight, and Dave continues to keep quiet and still.  It’s not his family, not his business.  His aunt’s funeral had been about the same, since she’d married rich and everyone and their mother had opinions about her will.  When Klaus’ siblings finally start to file back inside, Dave lets out a relieved sigh and turns his mind to happier thoughts, like getting to know Klaus all over again.

* * *

Klaus has no idea what to do with the handsome man next to him.  Well.  He knows what he’d _like_ to do.  However, Dave has nine months of memories about the two of them getting to know each other in the middle of a war, and that’s maybe, possibly, perhaps just a little bit intimidating because what does he know about Klaus?  What does he like?

“Sooooo,” Klaus says once they’ve reentered the house and settled uncomfortably on a couch in the living room, “The 1960s, huh?”  Ben gives him an unimpressed look from the armchair that says, _smooth move, Klaus_.

Dave smiles and it lights up his whole face.  “That’s right.  And it looks like this time I’m going to be the one asking you about the hip slang and weird technology.”

“Uh-huh,” he replies, but his voice is high and uncertain, and there’s something funny about that because _Klaus_ is high and uncertain.

Ben, as always, has an opinion.  “He seems serious about this.  Don’t push him away just because you’re uncomfortable with feelings.”

“No one asked you,” he mutters before realizing how that will sound to Dave.

His future (past?) boyfriend’s eyes follow where Klaus had been glancing and he gets pretty close to looking straight at Ben.  “Someone else here?”

“Yeah,” Klaus admits in surprise.  “You… know?”  Sure, the Umbrella Academy had been popular when Klaus was a child, but people don’t recognize him on the street as The Séance anymore.  And time travel boy here shouldn’t have known at all.

Dave smiles again, but this one is sad.  “You didn’t like it.  Sometimes after battles, it was hard for you to tell who made it back alive.”  Because he’d see the whole unit, regardless of who kicked the bucket.  Fuck.

“Okay, uh, that sucks.”

Dave hums in agreement.  “Let’s talk about something lighter.  Tell me about where people go to dance around here.”

“You want to go clubbing?”  A man after his own heart.

“I’d like that, if that’s what you want.  Klaus, I – I don’t want you to feel obligated.  I don’t expect us to pick back up where we were when I left Vietnam.  If you don’t want to pursue a relationship, I’m not going to push.  What I want is to support you, whether that happens as a friend or a partner.”

Klaus opens his mouth but doesn’t speak at first, unsure what to do with such kind, sincere affection.  “Oh, um.  Thanks.”

* * *

After leading Mom back inside and making sure she’s settled, Diego leaves the Academy.  The stifling mood is getting to him and he’d rather be doing something productive.  Tracking down the catalyst for the apocalypse is productive.

He catches Detective Patch at the station and sinks into the chair next to her desk.  “I’ve had a hell of a day.”

Patch nods grimly and sets down her pen.  “Funerals are tough.”

“Well, there was that too,” and he stops halfway before touching the pocket with Dad’s monocle, “but my brother – who’s been missing since, shit, 2002 – came back today.  We all thought he was dead.”

“That’s – wow.”

“I know.  He was, you know, like the rest of us.”

Patch nods in acknowledgment.  “My little sister read the comics as a kid.  Which one was he?”

“He was The Boy.  Teleporter.  Apparently, his time travel experiment worked the first time, but he couldn’t get back.  He was gone for a fuckton of years on his end and he’s got some news about – well, things breaking bad here in the city not too long from now.”

“Shit, Diego.”

Diego exhales heavily.  “Pretty much.”

He doesn’t think she believes all of it (and he’s not sure _he_ would), but she looks sympathetic.  “I’m sure you’re stressed.  Is there anything I can do?”

It’s a perfect segue.  “We’re looking into a company called MeriTech, something about prosthetic devices.  My brother found one at the epicenter of whatever the fuck happened.  Would you be able to access any open cases about them?  If someone here is building a case for embezzlement or other shady dealings there, that could help us find who we’re looking for.”

“You know I can’t share any specific information with a vigilante,” Patch reminds him, giving Diego an unimpressed look.  “However, I might be able to tell you whether or not there are any open investigations right now.  No details, just a yes or no.  Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Oh, I believe in you, Eudora,” Diego says with a grin.

“Don’t call me that.”

* * *

With no tracker in his arm, Five enjoys a mediocre cup of coffee at Griddy’s Doughnuts and gets the address for The Gimbel Brothers department store from the man sitting next to him at the counter.  As he sips his coffee, Five thinks about the fact that he’d never been assigned a partner at the Commission and the fact that he’d been the only living person on Earth for his entire adult life.  Being self-sufficient had been necessary, but it hadn’t been easy.  Five needed to be in control of things, because it was either that or die on the surface of an uncaring planet.  Letting other people control things when he joined the Commission had been hard.

Part of him curses himself for telling his brothers and sisters about the apocalypse.  They’re just more variables that he has to keep an eye on, and any one of them could stumble onto something that would put them in Hazel and Cha-Cha’s crosshairs.  He isn’t willing to lose any more siblings, not now that he’s here to chase off the end of the world.

Another part of him points out that he didn’t have a choice.  Dave would have told them anyway, and at least with Five telling them, they’ve got a more complete picture.  This part of him knows the phrase “strength in numbers” and remembers a childhood filled with Umbrella Academy missions that were handled as a team.

Five scowls, wondering if he’s getting soft in his old age, and leaves the doughnut shop.

He checks his rearview mirror a few times on the drive over to Vanya’s apartment building, but he doesn’t spot any tails.  Pogo gave him Vanya’s apartment number, so after parking on the street, Five counts the windows from the end until he figures out which ones are hers.  He jumps in – with some effort after all the other jumps he’s made today – and immediately scans the space.  Yes, there’s a familiar violin case on the chair in front of him and a couple books on the shelf that he recognizes as Vanya’s.  Five is in the right apartment.

He waits.

* * *

Vanya had intentionally left the Hargreeves mansion to run errands before the save-the-world meeting could resume.  She vividly remembers Umbrella Academy mission briefings where her input was neither wanted nor needed, and her lack of extraordinary powers means that there’s nothing she can add to the team –

Which is why finding Five in her apartment scares the absolute shit out of her.  “Jesus!”

Five recommends locks for her windows and Vanya feels her heartbeat slow back to normal while she unpacks.  After she settles into her living room, she asks: “Why are you here?”

Five folds his hands in front of him.  “I’ve decided that teamwork may not be the worst idea in the world.  It’s still terrible, and I’m sure things will go off the rails with you morons running around, but what’s done is done.”

“Why?”

“Because despite being me, I can only be in so many places at once.”

That’s maybe the most modest thing Vanya’s ever heard him say.  “That still doesn’t explain what you think I could offer.  Why me?”

“Because you’ll listen, and you’ll think before doing something stupid,” Five replies.  “Powers aren’t the only valuable tools a person can have.”

This conversation almost doesn’t feel real. “That’s not what you thought as a kid.”

“Well, I spent forty-five years in the apocalypse.  I developed other skills.  So.  If we’re getting the band back together, so to speak, are you on board?”

It’s what she always wanted growing up, and she’s deeply touched that Five came to ask her personally, but as an adult she has other responsibilities too.  “My orchestra has a concert in a week, but I’ll see what I can do.  I’m third chair, so I might be able to miss a rehearsal here or there.  Cancelling my lessons, though – apocalypse or not, I still need to pay rent when this is over.”

Five nods.

* * *

The target may have cut out his tracking device before going rogue, but it doesn’t take that much longer for the Commission’s soldiers to find Five Hargreeves.  He’d tried to pull a fast one by leaving the stolen briefcase in the middle of nowhere, but the Handler had pulled his file and sent them the name of the city where his family was raised and where most of them still live.  The leader of the hit squad, Karl Fitzgerald, checks the thumbnail again of the Hargreeves’ family car and compares it to the one parked outside an apartment building.  The license plates match.

Karl gestures the team forward to the front door and the lock yields to a single bullet from a silenced weapon.  The office door inside the empty lobby yields just as easily.  Karl pulls the tenant records from the cabinet under the desk and skims the pages until he reads “Vanya Hargreeves” among the names of second-floor tenants.  That must be where Five is.  Karl memorizes the room number and leads the team towards the stairs.

* * *

Five hears them a few steps before they reach the door.  “Vanya, bathroom now.”

“What?”

“We’re under attack.”  Damn, damn, _damn_.  Based on the number of jumps he’s already made today, he’s going to black out after this fight.

The shot to her lock sends Vanya scrambling across the apartment and Five hears the bathroom door close behind her.  He jumps over to her kitchen, pulling on his work gloves, and yanks open drawers looking for the kitchen knives.  Unfortunately, the soldiers storm the apartment before he gets his hands on any and Five drops to the ground behind the table to get out of their sightline.

A quick peek shows that they’ve fanned out, checking different directions.  Five can use that.  Before he makes his move, though, the leader speaks.  “Let’s all be professional about this, yeah?  They want to talk.”

“I’ve got nothing to say,” Five shoots back from behind the table.

The leader tries to convince him to surrender, but Five has a world to save.  He jumps into the middle of them, startling one into firing a shot which, once Five jumps away again, hits one of his companions.  A quick glance shows that it was fatal.  Next, he jumps behind one of the four still standing and aims the man’s gun at the others, trying to keep the spray of bullets away from the bathroom.  He clips one and kills another before the owner of the gun wrestles him off.  As Five passes the front door he thinks to hit the lights, plunging the room into darkness except for the glow from the hallway and some street lamps outside.

Five employs every dirty trick he knows to get them to take each other out.  Once the cops show up, they’re going to wonder what the hell happened here, and Five can’t let them think there was another professional hitman involved, especially one defending Vanya.  Five doesn’t have time to be arrested.

The last two go down at the same time in a move that Five is a little proud of.  He’d latched onto the short one and jumped with him into the leader’s line of fire just as the short one was also pulling the trigger.  It was almost neat.  Then, with his assailants all down, Five puts his hands on his knees and takes a moment to catch his breath, his vision going dark at the edges.  Between the time travel, the jumps, and being fifty-eight goddamn years old, it doesn’t matter that he’s in excellent shape.  He’s definitely going to pass out in the next ten minutes.

Finally, Five straightens up and knocks on the bathroom door.  “It’s me.”

“My god,” Vanya says after she opens the door.  “Five, are you alright?”

“I’m better than the Commission’s soldiers, that’s for sure.  We need to skedaddle in case there are more waiting in the wings.”  He shoves open her window and pops out the screen.  “If anyone asks, you climbed out the window when those lunatics showed up, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”  Vanya takes his extended hand and he jumps them down to the road.

“We’re going to walk a couple streets away from the scene and then take a cab to the Academy.  Sound good?”

Vanya looks back up at her apartment and laughs shakily.  “Can’t be worse than here,” she jokes.

Five knows they manage to flag down a cab, but he remembers absolutely nothing of the ride home.

* * *

Diego had returned to the station later in the evening to bug Patch for information on MeriTech, so he’s there when the call comes in about a shootout at an apartment building on North Mill Street.  Multiple shots fired inside one of the second-floor apartments, number of victims unknown.

“Don’t,” Patch orders, but Diego follows two minutes behind the police cars anyway because it’s not illegal for him to want to take a drive towards North Mill.  Patch and the other detectives head for the stairs to the second floor, where it sounds like most of the action happened, but Diego idles in the lobby after spotting a security camera at the building’s entrance.  He steps around the cops checking out the bullet hole in the office door and approaches the unfortunate employee whose name was first on the list to call in an emergency.

“Where are the tapes for the camera?” he asks, gesturing back towards it.

The man blinks.  “They’re, um – I think they’re back this way.”  He takes Diego into a back room, struggling with the interface for a few minutes before managing to queue up the tapes to about five minutes before people started hearing shots.

“Wondered where you’d snuck off to,” Patch says, coming to peer over Diego’s shoulder.

Diego smiles.  “Were you missing me?”

“Never,” she shoots back, but her lips turn up slightly.  “Have we got anything on the tapes?”

The staff member startles.  “Just, um, just starting them, ma’am.”

“How is it upstairs, Patch?”

“Brutal.  Five bodies, but it looks like they were the aggressors.  Professionals, probably.”

“Damn.”  Diego watches the grainy image as a few tenants exit the building and cars pass by on the street.  He switches his focus to the vehicles parked by the curb, hoping to spot someone suspicious loitering around, and he freezes when he recognizes one car across the street.  It’s too far way to get a plate number, but he knows from the dent to the rear that it’s the family car.  Five had announced his intention to take it out earlier to get a decent cup of coffee.  Five was _here_.

“There they are,” Patch says, pointing at the screen where five men dressed in all black approach the front door.  The one in front shoots the lock and they troop inside.  “This confirms that the weapons we recovered all belonged to the assailants.  Now I want to know whose apartment they broke into.”

Diego follows her back out to the desk.  Patch starts to pull open the cabinet but stops and reaches instead for a stack of unfiled papers sitting haphazardly on top of it.  She flips through the pages until she finds the right apartment number.  Diego knows that he reads the name “Vanya Hargreeves” at the same time as Patch because she immediately flips the paper over.

“Diego, I need you to leave the building right now.”

“My sister couldn’t have done this.”  Defending her leaves a bad taste in his mouth after what she did to the family, but being responsible for a shootout is outside what Vanya is capable of.

“I know that Ms. Hargreeves comes from a family of extraordinary people and I have absolutely no idea what she can or cannot do.”

“No, she has no powers, never has.  Her whole book was about it.”

“Go, Diego, or I’ll have you arrested for obstructing a police investigation.  I’m not joking around.”

* * *

Hazel unlocks the door to the motel room and flips on the lights, followed closely by Cha-Cha with their package from the Commission.  There’s a message taped to the inside of the box.

“Apparently, the machine that Number Five stole and destroyed was briefcase 3876,” Cha-Cha says, reading the note.

“I thought our briefcase was 3876.”

“Exactly.  There’s something funny going on here and we’re not going to let our briefcase out of our sight until we get to the bottom of it.”

* * *

Vanya has been sitting on her childhood bed for an hour, trying to get the sound of gunshots out her head, when there’s a knock on the door and Five enters without pausing for a response.  She waits for him to say something, but he just takes a seat beside her, joining her in staring at the wall.  He looks better than he did in the cab, where he lost consciousness after too many space-jumps.  Hopefully he got some sleep in his old room before coming to find her.

They’re both still for two minutes, three minutes, four minutes.  Five breaks the stalemate to awkwardly pat her on the shoulder and Vanya realizes that he’s trying to comfort her by keeping her company.  “Thanks, Five.”

“Don’t mention it.  I have a reputation to keep up.”

She manages a smile.  “I think reputations might not work on siblings.  Allison has a reputation in the media for being calm and collected.  Diego has a reputation for always being a tough guy.  We know better.”

Five seems genuinely offended by the comparison.  “Just because Diego can’t do it doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t,” he insists.  “Most people think I’m dangerous.  Lethal, even.”

“Most people never saw you in your alien phase when you were eight.  You were utterly convinced that Dad wasn’t human.  Did you ever tell him to his face?”

“No, but I stand by that theory, Vanya.”

They stay like that for most of the night, trading stories from their shared childhood and not thinking about the people who are after their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for the sweet comments you left on chapter one! I love hearing from you all :)
> 
> \-----
> 
> In the comics, apparently Reginald Hargreeves IS an alien, though I can’t tell if show!Reggie came from another planet or just a different time period far in the future. I fully embrace the headcanon of show!Five, a precocious and stubborn child, having an alien phase and being 100% correct even as Reginald scrambles to discourage this particular interest.
> 
>  **Five, watching one of his siblings pull on a push door:** If humans are the most advanced life in the universe I’m going to walk straight into the ocean
> 
> \-----
> 
>  **Five:** I don’t have favorite siblings.
> 
>  **Luther:** I need to figure out how Dad died.  
>  **Five:** God, get your priorities in order, stopping the apocalypse comes before anything else.
> 
>  **Vanya:** I need to give music lessons and rehearse for my concert.  
>  **Five:** I recognize that you have real life responsibilities and whatever time you can schedule to help out is fine.


	3. T-minus 7 Days to the Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My knowledge of police procedure is minimal. For the rest of this fic, please suspend your disbelief when I inevitably get things wrong.
> 
> I’m also playing Calvinball a little bit with Five’s space-jumping abilities, but I’m trying to stick to the idea that Five can do a lot of little jumps or a few long-distance jumps before he has to eat and rest. The consequences of not doing so are fatigue and passing out. He can bring someone with him, but it takes more energy.
> 
> Just as a heads up, the next chapter may take a few days longer to edit and post than these ones, since I have a master’s thesis to write. In case you’re curious, my draft of this fic is about 26,000 words, plus two scenes in the middle and chapter 10, all three of which still need to be written.

Patch shows up at the Hargreeves’ mansion bright and early the next morning.  A perfectly coiffed, beautiful woman who introduces herself as Grace answers the door and invites Patch into the foyer.  “It’s so nice to meet you, Detective Patch.  Diego has told me so much about you.  Ah, but you’re here for Vanya right now, I’ll go see if she’s awake.  She had a late night.”  As Grace walks away, Patch realizes that this woman is Diego’s mother.  For a woman with seven kids who are now almost thirty, she looks impossibly young.

Vanya looks like she didn’t sleep at all last night, so Patch offers to move the interview to the kitchen while Vanya prepares breakfast.  “Ms. Hargreeves, can you tell me what happened at your apartment last night?”

“Yes, though there are a lot of things I’m not too sure about myself.  I was sitting in the living room with – with a book and a blanket on the sofa.  I don’t know about the time…”

“We have footage with a timestamp of the deceased entering the building.”

She stops buttering her toast and looks over, surprised.  “They’re dead?”

“Yes, all five of them.”

Vanya twitches at the number but returns to her breakfast.  “That’s… wow.  I’m sure your officers were very busy.”

Patch nods.  “What happened next?”

“I heard a shot and I hid in the bathroom.”

“You didn’t call the police?”

“My landline is in the kitchen.  I didn’t –” She takes a breath and lets it out slowly.  “My first reaction to danger is to hide, detective.  It’s what I’ve learned my whole life.  My brothers and sister were trained to fight, but my job was to stay out of the way.  Last night, I heard gunfire outside my front door and did what I’ve always done.”

“Do you know who those men were?”

Vanya shakes her head.  “I never saw them.  I lowered myself from the bathroom window and dropped to ground level.”

“Do you have any enemies, Ms. Hargreeves?”

“The Umbrella Academy had plenty of enemies.  As the weakest of my siblings, I make a good target.”

That’s a solid point, but that doesn’t explain the outcome of the attack.  The landlord had looked at the camera footage for last night and confirmed that, except for the five attackers, everyone who entered through the front door was a tenant.  That means no one else had been in Vanya’s apartment unless they’d been there all day.  “How did five hitmen end up dead in your living room, then?”

“I don’t know.”  She won’t meet Patch’s eyes and she takes a sip of her orange juice to hide her expression.  She’s lying.

“No ideas at all?”

Vanya does look at her now.  “I didn’t see anything.”  That’s not the same thing as not having any ideas, Patch notes.  “I didn’t do anything.”  Both of those statements sound like the truth.

Now that she’s spoken with Vanya and taken her measure, Patch doesn’t think that Vanya somehow brainwashed the invaders into killing each other.  However, Vanya knows more than she’s saying.  “Please take my card, Ms. Hargreeves,” Patch says, sliding it across the table.  “Call me if you think of anything else.”

“I’ll be sure to do that,” she replies.

* * *

Five storms into the kitchen and angrily slaps together a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich.  Klaus watches this and exchanges looks with Vanya, who looks just as unsure about how to address the situation.  “Five,” Vanya says carefully, “what’s wrong?”

“MeriTech kicked me out when I started to ask questions about the prosthetic eyeball.  They think I’m just a crazy old man.  Can you believe that?”

Oh, that’s an opening if Klaus ever heard one.

“Is there anything we can do?” Vanya asks before Klaus can string together a snappy comeback.

“I need someone they’ll listen to.”  Five pauses, and then eyes the two of them over.  “You two can pretend to be my kids and vouch for my sanity.”

“Sanity?  Don’t make a liar out of me,” Klaus jests.  That’s two openings in one minute.  Five is out of practice being a sibling.

Vanya frowns.  “I have to give lessons today, otherwise I would.”

“Klaus it is, then.”

“Hold up, I didn’t agree to this.  I’m a busy man.  I have a guest to entertain, after all –”

“Your boyfriend is helping Luther and Allison sift through paperwork in Dad’s office, don’t bullshit me.  This is about the apocalypse, Klaus.  Put on something professional and meet me at the door in fifteen minutes.”

* * *

“Number Five certainly did a number on the preliminary squad,” Hazel says, briefcase in hand, as he and Cha-Cha walk back down the second-floor hallway to the stairs.  The two assassins had managed to pass themselves off as nosy neighbors to get a peek past the police tape from the doorway.

“That’s why he’s a legend.”

“You’re not wrong.  I wish the Commission had given us more on him, though.  Something happened in that apartment to get them to shoot each other, something weird.  And without a tracker, how are we going to find him now?”

“We’ll track the tenant.”  Most of the neighbors didn’t know her name, but one woman, Mrs. Kowalski, said that her cat had wandered into the girl’s apartment a few times and that her name was Vanya.  “If Five was in her apartment, then this Vanya must know something about his movements.”

Down on the first floor, they approach the woman in the building’s small office.  “We’re looking for Vanya,” Cha-Cha announces.

The woman looks between them and, probably assuming they’re here with all the cops and detectives milling around, says: “I haven’t seen her today – and I don’t blame her.”

“Can you give us the spelling on her last name?” Hazel asks.  “Another detective has the report and it’ll be easier to just jot down the name now rather than track the report down later.”

She shuffles some papers around.  “Sure, it’s H-A-R-G-R-E-E-V-E-S.  She’s the one who wrote the book about the Umbrella Academy.”

Hazel and Cha-Cha exchange a glance.  “Thank you, ma’am.”

They head for the exit before any of the cops can say something to break their cover story.  On the way out the door, a young woman bumps into Hazel and mumbles an apology before continuing towards the stairs.

* * *

Vanya rubs her shoulder from the collision at the front entrance and heads up to her apartment.  Any hope of getting into her apartment falls when she spots the crime scene tape across the doorway.  She sighs, but approaches the officer standing guard at the door.

“Excuse me, this is my apartment.  My name is Vanya Hargreeves.”

“We’re still processing the scene.”

“Is there any way I could get my violin?  I’m a professional musician.  Also, my medication should be in my coat pocket and I need to take it today.”

“Wait here.”  The officer heads into the apartment and consults with the other cops, pointing at the violin case and back at her.  One of them nods and the officer brings her case and her coat over.

“Gosh,” an unfamiliar voice says, “I hope everything is okay.”

Vanya startles and turns to face the speaker, an unassuming man with a concerned expression.  “Can I help you?”

“I’m Leonard.  I’m your four o’clock?”  He looks at the crime scene tape and back at her.

She feels her face heat up, embarrassed at what he must be thinking.  She’s not a criminal.  “I’m so sorry about all of this.  There was an incident – some men attacked my apartment last night, and we’re still not sure what happened.”

“Should I take a rain check on the lesson?”

“That might be for the best.”

“Or, well… if your apartment isn’t available, we could have the lessons at my place.  I have plenty of room and no housemates to bother us.”  Vanya opens her mouth and closes it, searching for a polite way to refuse.  “Alright, I know you don’t know me from Adam.  If my house would make you uncomfortable, why don’t we practice at my woodworking shop?”

“Won’t that bother your customers?”

“Eh, it’s pretty slow on Monday nights, and my assistant can handle anyone that comes in.”  He smiles encouragingly.  “What do you say?”

Leonard seems sweet.  Plus, practicing in a semi-public space should be safe enough.  “Sure, we can do that.”

“Great!  The only thing is…” and here Vanya tenses for a moment before Leonard continues, “I haven’t eaten since breakfast.  Would you mind if we stopped for something on the way over?  We could get an early dinner, my treat.”

“Oh.  That’s very kind, thank you.  Where did you want to eat?”

* * *

A quick trip to the library yields a copy of Vanya Hargreeves’ memoir, complete with information about Five and each of Vanya’s other oddball siblings.  “Shit,” Cha-Cha says about thirty pages in, “this is Number Five’s family all right.  It sounds like they’re all dangerous except for Number Seven, the author.  They’ve got a mansion in the city where at least one of them still lives.  Number Five is probably holed up there.”

Hazel sighs.  “The Commission won’t send us backup, right?”  Cha-Cha doesn’t dignify that with a response.  “Just another example of management sticking it to the working man.”

“Oh, quit whining.  Look, once we know the situation about the six of them, we can plan around their powers.  Let’s both read the book tonight to prepare for our assault and then go in tomorrow.”

* * *

“Don’t worry, everyone, I’m back.”  At Klaus’ dramatic announcement, Luther looks up briefly from the file he’s holding and then back down.

Klaus gets a better response from Dave, who gestures to the only empty floorspace next to him.  “C’mon, dig into this stack with us.  Your sister is chipping away at the library down the hall.  Did you have a good trip?”

“It was great, I got to punch Five.”

“Klaus!  He’s fifty-eight.”

“He probably deserved it,” Luther mutters in a rare moment of levity.

Klaus sits down cross-legged and picks up whatever paperwork is closest.  “It’s weird seeing Dad’s study like this.  He always kept it in perfect condition and we weren’t allowed in.”

“That good condition is helping us now,” Luther points out loyally.  “Everything is already organized; we just have to find the right notebook or folder.”

Klaus picks through a few files, not really expecting to find anything.  If Dad had known the cause of the apocalypse, he would have pointed Luther right at it.  Klaus figures if he waits ten minutes and excuses his himself for a glass of water, no one will notice when he doesn’t come back.

When he first skims the blueprints from one of the oversize files, Klaus thinks they’re for some sort of panic room.  But then he notices the spikes built into the _inside_ of the boxy room and the locking mechanism on the outside of the door.  His father’s initials are penciled on the corner of the page and Klaus feels his stomach turn over.  “Hey, guys?”

“Did you find something?” Luther asks.

“Maybe?  Have you ever seen this room in the house?”

Luther steps around the stacks of paper to peer down at it.  “It’s nowhere I’ve been.”

“I don’t recognize it either,” Ben says from over his other shoulder.

“This is a cell.”

“Maybe he was designing it for a correctional facility,” Luther suggests optimistically.

Klaus takes a deep breath.  “Then why does it have Vanya’s number written on it?”

“What?” Luther and Ben say together.  Klaus points at the margins of the page, where Reginald’s handwriting reads:

 

> _Number Seven_
> 
> _Female subject, age 4_
> 
> _Soundproofing required_
> 
> _Must be able to withstand winds of up to 150 km/hr._

“A hundred and fifty kilometers per hour is a hurricane,” Ben informs him, stunned.

“Jesus Christ.  Vanya has powers.”

“Get Allison,” Luther orders Dave, and to his credit, Dave must see that Klaus and Luther are both spooked by the news, because he doesn’t hesitate to leave the room.

“There must have been a good reason Dad didn’t tell us about Vanya’s powers.  Do you think she…?”

Klaus shakes his head.  “No, did you read her book?  No way she was faking it.  Vanya doesn’t know.”

Allison rushes in a few moments later.  “What’s wrong?”

“We think Vanya might have had powers like us,” Luther informs her, pointing towards the blueprints.  “For some reason, she doesn’t know, but Dad did.  He was probably protecting her, or us.”

Allison’s mouth works around unspoken words in shock for a few long moments before she finally says: “I understand now.”  She looks up from the blueprints at the two of them.  “When we were four, Dad told us Vanya was sick.  She had to be isolated.”  Klaus nods, remembering, and he listens as Allison tells them what Dad had ordered her to do, what she was made to say.  “He made me an accomplice. I’ve _been_ in that room where she – where he kept her.”  She puts her hand over her mouth, horrified.

“We need to learn more,” Luther declares.  “He must have done it for a reason.  Maybe she hurt herself.  Maybe using her powers made her sick.”

Ben snaps his fingers to get Klaus’ attention.  “Dad kept notes about all of our training.  Those books have got to be around here somewhere.”

“Dad’s training notebooks,” Klaus says.  “Have we come across those yet, Luther?”

“No, I didn’t think they were relevant.  That’s a good idea, Klaus.”

“I have those sometimes,” Klaus says as Ben throws him a betrayed look.

“Seriously?” Ben demands.  Klaus gives him a shrug like, _what did you want?_

Allison turns to face the cabinets.  “Let’s find them.”

* * *

Patch rings the bell of the Hargreeves mansion for the second time today.  This time a full minute passes before world-renowned actress Allison Hargreeves answers the door.  “Can I help you?”

“I have some more questions for Vanya Hargreeves about the shootout at her apartment.”

“The _what?_ ”

Patch raises an eyebrow.  “Five men attacked her apartment last night and shots were fired.”

Clearly, none of this is ringing a bell for Allison.  “God, that’s why she was here this morning.  We’ve been kind of busy,” she explains, flashing an embarrassed smile that rubs Patch the wrong way.  “Some of us are going through our father’s effects.  Sorting out what to keep now that he’s – now that he doesn’t need them anymore.”

Something about her tone rings false, but Patch shakes off the distraction.  “May I speak to Vanya?”

“She’s not here.  If her apartment was trashed, though, then she’s probably staying in her old room upstairs.  You could try back later tonight.”

Tonight doesn’t work for Patch.  “Would you let her know that I’ll be stopping by in the morning?”

“Yes, of course,” Allison replies, and she’s in an awful hurry to close the door for someone with nothing to hide.

* * *

When Vanya excuses herself to the shop’s bathroom partway through the lesson, Leonard takes the opportunity to search her coat.  He extracts an orange pill bottle from the depths of her pocket and he smiles.  He’d watched Vanya accept the coat and violin from the officer, but Leonard had interrupted before she had the chance to check her pockets.  When she eventually notices that the bottle is gone, she’ll naturally assume that it fell out at home.

It would take a lot of effort to search Vanya’s apartment for any refills now, but if he waits until the cops have cleared out and she starts holding lessons there again, he’s confident that he can find some pretense to search the space.

* * *

“We have to tell her,” Allison insists, holding one of the notebooks to her chest protectively.  “We don’t have the right to withhold this kind of information.”

Luther shakes his head.  “Dad did what was best for us.”  Beside him, Klaus snorts.  “I don’t think we should rush to tell Vanya about her powers if we don’t know what it could do to her, or what she could do to the rest of us.”

“I think Allison’s right,” Klaus volunteers.  “Vanya’s a big girl, she can make her own decisions.”  Besides, anything that will have Reginald Hargreeves turning in his grave is something that Klaus supports, and if Klaus ever manages to get ahold of the bastard, he’ll tell him.  Dad can’t do anything to him now except jump scares.

Luther pinches the bridge of his nose.  “We can hold a family meeting without Vanya to talk about this.  I’ll track down Diego and Five tomorrow and we can all come to a decision together.  Does that sound like a fair plan?”

“It’ll do for now,” Allison replies firmly.  Klaus has a feeling that, no matter what everyone else agrees on, Allision might decide to take matters into her own hands.

* * *

Dave had suggested a stroll around the block to decompress after the shocking revelations of this afternoon, and that had sounded… nice?  Like something normal people did?  But the two of them have been walking in silence for ten minutes now and it’s killing Klaus.  “I’m not good at relationships,” he finally blurts out.

“You know what they say: past performance doesn’t guarantee future outcomes.”

That surprises a laugh out of Klaus.  “Isn’t that what they say at the end of, like, radio ads for investment groups or law firms?”

“It is,” Dave admits with a grin, and Klaus realizes that his past-future boyfriend is a dork.  “Before I was drafted, I was a secretary in a law firm.  Kept everything organized.  All that paperwork in your father’s office is just a normal day at work for me.”

“I’ve never held down a job.”

Dave looks surprised but not critical.  “What do you want to do?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I don’t.  I never asked.  For some folks in my unit, talking about plans for after the war was too painful while we were in the middle of it.  What are you interested in doing?”

Drowning out the voices of the dead.  Avoiding as much of his trauma as possible until it knocks him over the head.  Those have been his goals for so long that he doesn’t know what else to say.  “I don’t know.  I like food.  I also, uhhhh, had a crash course in chemistry.”  Over the years he’s gotten to know a lot about which combinations of chemicals make the ghosts vanish and what dosages he needs to stay high but still mostly functional.

“Cooking is like food chemistry.  Maybe something in the culinary world would be up your alley.”

Working in a restaurant wouldn’t be great money, although it’s much better than no money.  “Eh, maybe.”  Klaus’ thoughts turn instead towards the man beside him.  Dave is handsome, smart, kind, and trying to be supportive – Klaus can see what his other self had liked about him.

* * *

Vanya stands in the foyer with her coat over her arm, indecisive.  After returning to the Academy from lessons, she had completely forgotten about her medication.  Now she’s faced with the choice of heading out to her apartment after dark to find the bottle or going without it until the morning.  On the one hand, she doesn’t feel anxious right now, but on the other, waiting until she feels anxious to take her meds isn’t a great life choice.

She’s interrupted by a _bamf_ as Five pops into the house just inside the door.  With him is a full-size mannequin in a polka-dotted blouse and black skirt.

“Oh, good evening, Vanya.  Are you headed out?”

“I haven’t decided yet.  I can’t find my medication.  Um.”  She’s got to ask.  “What are you doing?”

“This is Delores.”

“Oh.”  That raises more questions than it answers.  “She’s very pretty,” Vanya offers hesitantly.

Five nods.  “She is.  And she’s a good listener too.”  He looks at the mannequin.  “Yes, one of your many good qualities, I know.”

“Is she, uh, staying here?”

“At least for the week.  She gives very good advice when I bounce ideas off her, and this week, I need to be at the top of my game.”

“That makes sense,” Vanya replies, and wonders how her life got to be so weird that anything about this makes sense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What’s really impressive is the Hargreeves’ failure to communicate like adults. Did Vanya tell anyone in her family about the shootout during Five’s visit? No. Does Diego track down his sister to ask what happened to the five goons that are dead on her floor? Also no.
> 
> In case the Patch and Allison scene wasn’t clear, Allison’s thought process was: there’s a detective who wants to talk to Vanya about a shootout --> we just figured out Vanya has superpowers --> maybe let’s not tell law enforcement that Vanya is extraordinary now
> 
> Audience participation time! I’m open to suggestions about where you think Klaus and Dave should go on a date in a few chapters. Should they go to that bowling alley? Out dancing? Something else? Also, let me know what you thought of this chapter.
> 
> Again, thank you all so much for your support!! Your comments make me feel warm and fuzzy inside :)


	4. T-minus 6 Days to the Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience! This chapter is very plot-heavy, but future chapters will have more humor and/or fluff.

Detective Patch’s second interview takes place on the porch of the Academy as Vanya gets later and later to rehearsal.  Vanya stumbles through the same answers she gave last time, trying to avoid mentioning that she hadn’t been alone in the apartment.  She hadn’t asked Five exactly what happened and, given that the Commission’s soldiers had all ended up dead, she’s not sure she wants to know the specifics.  Vanya can see Patch getting frustrated, but there’s nothing else Vanya can tell her without bringing up time travel, which the detective won’t believe without proof.

“We finished processing the scene yesterday,” Patch finally says when she runs out of questions.  “There will be an officer watching the building for the next few days as a precaution.  Do you still have my card?”

Vanya nods, and as soon as politeness dictates, she excuses herself.  After checking her watch, she gives up on jogging to the bus stop and flags down a cab instead.  There’s no time to stop by her apartment to pick up her backup pill bottle.  Hopefully she won’t be in too much trouble for being tardy to rehearsal.

* * *

Five sighs and continues to watch the MeriTech building across the street.  Even he can admit that Klaus’ act had been brilliant yesterday, but the results of his intimidation weren’t as promising.  Lance Bigg’s records hadn’t yielded an owner for the prosthetic eye, and Five is unwilling to just sit around until the mysterious one-eyed villain decides to jump-start the end of times.

He lets his eyes go out of focus for a moment, distracted, and suddenly everything around him is ash.  He’s back in the destroyed city and he’s all alone again and –

“Five,” he hears, and he snaps out of it to see Luther squishing himself into the van.  “You okay?”

“How did you find me?”

“Um…” Luther gestures back and Five turns to see Klaus in the back, adjusting the collar of Delores’ blouse.

“Stop that,” Five says, throwing an empty soda can at him.  “What are you two doing here?  I thought you all were looking through Dad’s junk.”

“We think Vanya might have powers like us, according to Dad’s notes, but she doesn’t know it.  We need you to come back to the academy.  It’s important.”

Five rubs his eyes.  “As important as saving the world?  I can’t just take a break for a family discussion.”

“So don’t think of it as taking a break,” Klaus suggests.  “Think of it as coming at this from another angle.  Who knows?  Maybe Vanya’s power will give us a leg up.”

 _You should be there for your sister_ , Delores counsels, and the guilt trip is what tips the scales in his family’s favor.  He knows that Delores remembers all of the years where Five would have given anything to speak to his family.

* * *

When Diego drops onto a sofa in the living room and finally hears what this family meeting is about, his first thought is: _shit, what if Vanya really did kill those intruders?  What if Five’s visit was unrelated?_   “What is it exactly that she can do?”

Allison turns a few pages in one of the notebooks.  “From what Dad observed, it seems like Vanya is able to harness sound and convert it into energy.”

And she turned out to be a musician?  Damn.  “I think telling her would be a mistake.  We don’t even know what ‘sound into energy’ means.  And we don’t have the first clue how dangerous it could be.  None of us have ever seen it.”

“I think that of any of us, Vanya would be the most well-equipped to deal with manipulating sounds,” Allison retorts.  “It’s what she _does_.”

“Seconded,” Klaus says from the bar.

Luther crosses his arms and leans against one of the columns.  “For once, I agree with Diego.”

“Must be the end of the world,” Five quips with an ironic smile.

“You’re the most pragmatic out of all of us, Five.  If _Dad_ thought that Vanya’s power was too volatile to train, do you think we could do any better?  There’s too much potential for collateral damage.  If she’s not going to be able to use it, then we shouldn’t burden her with the knowledge.”

“Of course we’re gonna tell her, you numbskulls.  Sure, Dad did ‘what was best for the Academy’, but the Academy was all about control.  It certainly didn’t turn out well for any of us individually, did it?”  He looks around at all of them, daring them to disagree.  “We’re all screwed up.  The Academy didn’t build people, it built tools, and Dad doesn’t get a vote anymore about whether we give Vanya back something that was already hers.  And also, pragmatically, we could use all the firepower we can get.”

“I think we should consider the fact that she was so dangerous that Dad built a place to hold her if she lost control.”

Klaus rejoins the argument.  “Hey, we’re not going to lock our sister up, no matter what Dad did.  She hasn’t done anything wrong or irresponsible or whatever else you’re thinking with her powers.”

Luther exhales heavily.  “Look, we don’t have the time right now to really think about how everything would play out, what with the, you know, apocalypse coming up.”

Five pounces.  “So as soon as the day of reckoning is cancelled, you’re okay with it?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“What you _said_ is that this meeting was going to have a yes-or-no outcome to it, not whine about details.”

“We’re here to vote –”

“Yes, and if you’ll count, I think you’ll find that the vote right now is three to two.”

“Count what?” Vanya says from the door.

* * *

“It’s just a… family meeting,” Allison says, and Five is going to kill her.

Vanya huffs a laugh with no humor in it.  “So of course you couldn’t bother to include me.”

“No, Vanya, it’s not like that –”

“I’ve been left out of everything for as long as I can remember.  Why should this be any different?”  She turns on her heel and stalks out of the room.

Five is already moving after her, but he throws a glare back at his siblings.  “Nice job, idiots,” he hisses, “let’s stress out the woman with untrained powers whose medication is missing.  You know, the medication Dad’s had her taking her whole life?  Brilliant fucking move.”

He jumps into the hallway in front of Vanya and holds up a hand.

“Don’t bother, Five.  I thought maybe – but I was wrong.  No one in this house gives a shit whether I’m involved.”

“Actually, the meeting was about including you,” Five corrects, which stops Vanya in her tracks.

“What, so you needed to have a debate about whether I get a say in family matters?”  He can feel her trying to hold onto her anger even though she’s obviously curious.

Family vote or not, Five would have told her anyways for the reasons he’d described to Luther.  “The others found something in Dad’s notes, something about you.”  So he starts with what Luther told him on the way over to the Academy.  He talks about the blueprints and the pile of notebooks with tests that Dad ran and the family’s uncertainty about what using her powers could do to her.  He does not tell her about Allison’s involvement under their father’s orders, because that’s not a discussion he wants to get in the middle of.  Allison is an adult and can make her own apologies.

“That can’t be right.  That’s not right,” Vanya insists.  “I would’ve figured it out by now if I was like the rest of you.”  Her eyes narrow.  “This isn’t a very good joke, Five.”

“Oh please, you think I would be in on anything this juvenile?  It’s not a prank, Vanya.  Allison’s been studying the notebooks since last night.”

“I would know, alright?” she insists, voice rising.  “I’m just – _ordinary._ ”  As she finishes the word, a vase falls off the table across the room and shatters.  “That wasn’t me.  That was just a coincidence.”

“Allison says it’s linked to your emotional state.  Dad put you on medication to suppress your feelings so you couldn’t access it.”

Vanya looks dour.  “I don’t believe you.”

“It sounds like something Dad would do though, doesn’t it?  He was a bastard to the end.”  Then, softer: “Do you feel any different without your pills?”

She pauses.  “A little,” she confesses doubtfully.  “Everything seems a bit… clearer.”

Five nods and gently tugs her back towards the living room.  “That’s probably good.  Now, let’s head back.  Those morons are probably still arguing in there over what is now a moot point.”

* * *

“You told her?”  Vanya can hear the anger and incredulity in Luther’s voice.

“You’re the one who put it to a vote, Luther,” Five replies, unconcerned.

“We hadn’t come to a consensus yet.  We were still – discussing.”

Vanya drops Five’s hand to come further into the room.  She may not believe in these supposed powers of hers, but now she’s furious.  “Were you going to hide this for the rest of our lives?  Another family bond that I didn’t get to be in on?”

“You could hurt other people, or yourself.  It was for everyone’s protection.”  He even believes that.  She can see in his eyes that he truly thinks hiding her powers – if she really does have them – was the best move. God almighty, Dad had gotten his claws so deep into Luther that her brother might not survive having them pulled out.

“The Umbrella Academy was disbanded,” Vanya bites out.  Two lightbulbs short out in one of the lamps, but she barely hears it over the roar of her anger.  “You don’t make decisions for our family anymore.”

“Thought you said that we were never a real family,” Diego fires from out of the blue, surprising her with a second attack.  “In fact, I distinctly remember reading that we had nothing connecting us after Ben died.”

Vanya doesn’t take her eyes off of Luther when she answers: “And after all of this, you wonder why I thought so?”

“I can’t believe you imbeciles are still talking about this,” Five says, interrupting the argument.  “Look, Vanya knows now, it’s in the past.  Now let’s return to _slightly more important_ issues like, say, the end of times.”

* * *

Mom had noticed the tension in the house and made smoothies to cheer them all up.  Sitting at the same table with his siblings right now is an unappealing prospect, so Klaus and Dave head out to one of the benches in the courtyard.

“How did everyone take the news that your sister knows?”

“Luther stormed out and ripped a door off its hinges after the shouting match.  Diego went looking for a dartboard, probably.  I don’t know about everyone else.”

“Are you doing okay?”

Klaus takes an angry slurp of his smoothie.  “The whole fight was just ridiculous.  It was like they all forgot it was _Vanya_ we were talking about. Our sister.  The one who cried when we stepped on ants as kids.”  Dave nods encouragingly.  “Just because none of us understand her powers doesn’t mean she deserves to be in the dark, or for Luther to lock her up.  She’s not a supervillain.  If she takes her time, she can get them under control.”

Dave leans back on the bench.  “That’s good advice.”

Klaus narrows his eyes.  “I have a feeling there’s a ‘but’ there.”

“But – and please don’t take this the wrong way – what makes her situation so different from yours?  Your siblings have said that you medicate yourself to keep your Sight from working,” which is a very tactful way of putting it, “but that’s not a long-term solution, Klaus, just like keeping Vanya numb isn’t good in the long run.”  He takes Klaus’ hand, and the warmth grounds Klaus in this moment.  “Learning more about what you can do could give you control.  Let you turn it on and off.  Your brother doesn’t break dishes and tables and doorknobs all the time, does he?  And your sister doesn’t always compel people with her voice.”

“I tried that already,” Klaus snaps.  “It didn’t work.”

Dave doesn’t look upset at Klaus’ tone.  On the contrary, his eyes are full of enough sympathy to make Klaus want to crawl away.  “Under your father, you tried it, and from what I hear, there are many things about himself that he could have improved on.”  Understatement of the fucking century.  Dave should have been a diplomat.  “Now that you have family members who are more grown up and someone who – who cares about you, I think you’ll be surprised at the results if you try again.”

Klaus bristles.  “For someone who doesn’t have powers, you have a lot of opinions on them.  It’s not – you make it sound easy.  There’s no guidebook.  And that’s just the supernatural shit.”  Not the fact that Klaus hasn’t been fully sober since he was a teenager.

“You deserve to have peace.  You deserve to be happy.”

“I can’t.”  Dave doesn’t understand.  “I _can’t_.”

Dave squeezes his hand.  “Hey, I’ll back off for now.  But I want you to know that I have faith in you, always, even if other people in your life haven’t.”

* * *

Hazel, who’s been watching the mansion and has seen the Hargreeves arrive one by one, realizes that all six of them are in there.  “I’ll be honest, Cha-Cha, I don’t like those odds.”

“We’ve had worse.”

“Yeah, maybe, but I don’t _want_ to end up running through Madrid in a bath towel again.”

“We’ll wait until they’re asleep,” Cha-Cha says, and they do.  The street has been deserted for hours and the lights inside the mansion are off when Hazel blows the lock.

* * *

Between today’s revelations and Sunday night’s attack, Vanya is still awake in her bed when she hears a loud _pop_ from somewhere in the mansion _._   It’s not the sounds of the house settling or one of Five’s jumps, so Vanya abandons her bed to investigate.  Anything to take a break from her thoughts.  She’d looked at those cell blueprints this afternoon and her father’s notes on the side had convinced her that Five and the others weren’t lying about her extraordinary powers.  It’s a terrifying thought.

Once downstairs, she catches movement near the front door and jerks back behind the living room doorframe.  Vanya waits a beat and then peeks out at two strangers in cartoonish animal masks, both with guns and one with a large briefcase.  Shit.  Two attacks in three days.  Are they here for Five, or is this about something else?  Vanya scurries further into the house as quietly as she can and feels the wall for a handle next to one of the curio cabinets.  She finds the right spot and pulls the alarm that Dad used back in the day to summon the Umbrella Academy for their missions.

* * *

Five snaps awake the instant the mission alarm starts to scream and he’s out the bedroom door before he can question why he’s hearing it now.  From the other rooms, he can hear his siblings doing the same thing.  It may have been a lifetime ago, but Five was trained to react to that sound.

“What’s going on?” Allison demands as she pulls open her door.

“Someone pulled the alarm.”  Five starts for the stairs with Luther and Allison right behind him, and he can see Diego already moving further down the hallway.

Diego pauses at the top of the stairs and Five sees Vanya rush up.  “Two intruders with masks and guns, front door.”

“Hazel and Cha-Cha,” Five realizes.  “I wondered why they’d been so quiet.”

Luther cracks his knuckles.  “I think Dad had a protocol in place in case the house was attacked.  Does anyone remember?”

“Crap, I don’t.”

“It’s been forty-five years, Luther.”

“Okay, then we’ll play this one by ear.”

Diego snorts.  “Oh, so Number One doesn’t remember either?”

“I didn’t bother to refresh my memory after the rest of you _left_.”

Five wishes he knew more about what happened last time around to give them an edge, but Klaus – “Klaus!  Vanya, check his bedroom and then the bathrooms.  And find everyone else too, let them know what’s going on.”  Vanya nods and leaves.

Diego pulls out a second knife.  “Right, so it’s four of us and two of them.  We can handle this.”

“We haven’t fought together in years,” Allison points out.

“Our coordination will need some work,” Five agrees.  “Let’s just try not to kill each other.”

The first thing Five notices when the assassins come into view in the living room is Cha-Cha reaching for something clipped to her belt and an awful noise starting to squeal.  She turns to Hazel and the makes the same motion.  Combined with the blaring mission alarm, which no one had bothered to turn off, the sound grates on his ears and completely blocks out whatever Allison is trying to say next to him.  Damn, that means no rumors.

“Vanya’s fucking book,” he can see Diego mouth on Allison’s other side.

Five jumps behind Cha-Cha to take her out (or at least stop that miserable racket), but she whips around to block the attack.  Most people don’t expect Five to move like that, but Cha-Cha isn’t most people.  Peripherally, he can hear Hazel firing bullets at the others, which explains why she turned her back on her targets.  Five reaches back blindly towards one of the many umbrella stands in the house and takes a swing at Cha-Cha with the first one he pulls out.  She hops backward and raises her weapon, but Five deploys the umbrella and, once the black nylon screens him from view, he jumps behind her again.  Regrettably, this puts Five right between Cha-Cha and Allison, who uses her black belt in taekwondo to put both of them on the ground with a kick.

Before Five can get his wind back, Cha-Cha leaps up and runs off further into the house.  Snarling, Five stumbles to his feet and gives chase.

* * *

Without speaking, Luther and Diego split up so the taller assassin (Hazel? Or Cha-Cha?) can’t point his gun at both of them.  Diego notices that he’s carrying a black briefcase which, whatever, if the guy wants to handicap himself then it’s his own fault when Diego takes him down.  Interestingly, Blue Mask continues to point his gun at Diego rather than Luther, which is a first.  Most villains see Luther’s bulk and assume that he’s more dangerous than Diego.  This one is smarter.

He reaches for a knife and Blue Mask fires, forcing him to spring to the side.  Diego tries a second time but another shot forces him to abort the motion again.  Blue Mask follows him as Diego circles the room, giving Luther a shot at his back.  The assassin is quicker than he looks, though, because he ducks Luther’s assault and swings the briefcase at his knees, catching Luther off balance.  Diego tries to close the distance between them, but another shot has him dodging to the side.  However, that moment of distraction is all Luther needs to surge back up and break Blue Mask’s gun arm.

While they’re duking it out, Diego glances over to see Five and the other assassin gone, probably battling it out somewhere else in the house.  Somewhere like –

“Where’s Mom?” Diego shouts over the noise, hoping Pink Mask didn’t go for the kitchen knives.  Luther shakes his head and mouths “I don’t know”, so Diego leaves him and Allison to take care of Blue Mask.

Mom isn’t in the kitchen (and what was he thinking?  It’s late, of course she’s at her charging station) but neither is the assassin.  He can finally hear himself think again, which reminds him that Pink Mask is carrying around a noise-maker like her buddy.  Diego listens for the sound and follows it towards the conservatory.

When he enters, Five and Pink Mask are both looking worse for wear.  Five is limping from a bullet graze on his leg and Pink Mask is bleeding badly as she pulls a knife out of her side.  Her head turns and she spots Diego, bringing her weapon up.  As he ducks behind a shelf of Mom’s spider plants, he hears three gunshots over the noise, a pause, and then a fourth.  When he pokes his head back out, he sees Five behind an orange tree and a shattered glass panel facing the outside of the house.  Pink Mask is gone.

* * *

Five very reluctantly accepts Diego’s help leaving the conservatory.  He reasons that it would be more work to avoid Diego than to just go along with him for once.  Five doesn’t actually need the help.  They make it up to the infirmary, where Luther and Allison are already breaking out the first aid supplies, and Five sinks to the cool floor.

“Someone get Mom,” Luther says, feeling Allison’s head for a bump.  “Allison got hit pretty hard with that briefcase.”  Diego, not normally one to listen to Luther’s orders, takes off.

After wrapping up his leg, Five just lays back on the tile to catch his breath.  Getting old is rough, though it’s better than the alternative.

Diego returns alone a few minutes later.  “I think something’s wrong with Mom.”

Five frowns.  “I didn’t think Hazel or Cha-Cha got over to that part of the house.”

“Not them.  She was programmed to be a protector, remember?  She didn’t react at all to the mission alert or the sound of gunfire.  There was – her hand, she was embroidering something at her charging station and she didn’t notice – she was sewing through her hand.”

Luther takes a few breaths.  “Okay, we’ll fix her up too.  Let’s get Mom and everyone else up here and then we can plan our next move.”

* * *

Vanya is stressed to hell and back, and knowing that strong emotions could potentially cause bigger problems is only making her more stressed.

Everyone is accounted for, at least, which is good.  She’d gotten Klaus out of the bath and away from where their siblings were battling the assassins.  The alarm and subsequent gunfire had brought Dave out of his guest room, and he followed her in search of something to defend them with.  Pogo had taken a while to locate, but she’d finally found him monitoring the situation through the surveillance cameras in Dad’s security room.

The cherry on top of this terrible day comes in the form of the doorbell ringing.  She’s not going to answer, not after everything that’s happened tonight, but it rings again and again and again.

Vanya sighs and looks at everyone else patching each other up in the infirmary.  “I got it.”  She winces when she steps around the remains of the chandelier in the foyer, wondering who was responsible for that.  She starts to flip the lock and then realizes that the whole locking mechanism is gone.  Instead, she reaches for the handle and opens the door.  “Hello?  Can I help you?”

On her doorstep is a uniformed police officer.  “We’ve received multiple calls from neighbors across the street about a noise disturbance.  Several said that they heard what sounded like gunshots.  I’m going to need to come inside, ma’am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much again for commenting! It really means a lot to get such sweet compliments from you.
> 
> About the scene between Dave and Klaus: Dave being here isn’t going to magically solve all of Klaus’ problems, because that’s not how addiction or trauma works, but having Dave’s love and support will make it easier down the road for Klaus to make some changes. It’s not something that I feel I can cover in depth here, since the timeline for the whole fic is only nine days, but just know that things will get better in the future. And there will be happier Dave-Klaus interactions in this story, fear not.
> 
> I'm curious about what you think re: Vanya and the rest of the Hargreeves knowing about her powers.


	5. T-minus 5 Days to the Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience! The next chapter may be up this weekend, but I’m not sure.
> 
>  **Chapter warning:** Vanya gets anxious a few times during this chapter without her pills. I don’t think it gets that bad, but if that kind of thing is triggering for you, please be careful.

Vanya is ambushed on her porch again, but this time instead of Detective Patch, it’s Leonard waiting for her.  “Hey, Vanya,” he says with a smile.  “I just wanted to check up on you.”

“On me?”

“Yeah, I was concerned after what you said happened at your apartment.  I know we’re not close, but it seemed like the friendly thing to do.  Are you doing okay?”

Vanya laughs.  “Not really, no.  It’s been a crazy couple of days.”

“Let me take you out for breakfast.  I’m sure you could use it.”

“I couldn’t impose on you again after dinner last night.  I’m actually headed over to my apartment right now to pack a bag.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t want to stay there right now and I’m getting tired of wearing the same clothes.  I’m hoping to run some errands before rehearsal, too.”

Leonard steps aside to let her pass and falls into step with her.  “That works out nicely.  While you pack your bag, I’ll whip something up in your kitchen.  Do you have eggs?

“I think bread is all I have in my fridge right now.”

He grins, undeterred.  “Alright, then we’ll do toast.” They chat on the walk over and small talk has never felt so easy or engaging.  Her worries about assassins and the apocalypse slip to the back of her mind.  Leonard asks about her history with the violin, and it’s nice to talk to someone about her music.  Usually, her young students have been coerced by their parents into taking lessons, but Leonard seems to be genuinely interested in listening to her.

“I know you’re new to playing,” she says, “but you might enjoy listening to some violin pieces.  My orchestra is having a concert next week, if you’re interested.”

“That’s great, Vanya, you should be really proud.”

Vanya shrugs, embarrassed.  “I’m only third chair, so it’s not that big a deal.”

“How does that work?” Leonard asks, and she explains that first chair is generally awarded the solos for the violin section.  “I’ll bet you would do a great job with it,” he assures her.

She even, tentatively, tells him about her new powers.  “I’m not going to use them, I don’t think.  It’s, uh, nerve-wracking to even think about.  But it feels good to know that I’m not as ordinary as my father always said I was.”

He puts a hand on her shoulder.  “After what you’ve been through, to keep going like you have, it’s amazing.  I bet your siblings were thrilled.”

Vanya’s smile fades.  “Not all of them.  Actually… we got in a pretty big fight about it.  Luther and Diego were unhappy.”

“Then they’re just envious.  You don’t need powers to make you an engaging and interesting person, but now you have them too.”  He smiles reassuringly.  “Say… are your siblings going to be at your concert?  It would be a good chance to show them what you’ve worked so hard on.”

“I’m going to invite them.  God knows if they’ll come.”

“Good.  I’m sure you’ll show them all.”

Once they arrive, Leonard shoos her into her room so he can put together breakfast from what she has in the kitchen.  When she comes back with her suitcase, Leonard is rooting around in the refrigerator.  “Just looking for the butter,” he clarifies, shutting the door.

“I think I’m out.”  But that reminds her.  Vanya opens the fridge and reaches automatically for her refill bottle in the butter tray.

* * *

Despite his scheming, Leonard hadn’t even needed to come here with her.  The police had cleared out of her apartment yesterday and the lock on her front door was still broken.  It had taken him less than twenty minutes to find her backup bottle in the fridge.

It’s bad luck on Leonard’s part that Vanya’s powers were revealed only days after her brother chucked Reginald Hargreeves’ journal.  However, his original plan for vengeance might still work after some modifications and a change of location.  Leonard has some preparations to make and coincidences to arrange.

* * *

Vanya frowns.  “Did you move an orange bottle? I usually keep my medication in with the butter.”

“I didn’t see a thing.”

“That’s strange.”

Leonard shrugs.  “Maybe.  Your home intruders might have taken them, or they could be tied up in evidence with the police.”

That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s better than anything Vanya can think of.  She didn’t forget to refill her prescription, because she always adds it to her list as soon as she finishes one bottle.  Vanya likes to always have two on hand.  Hmm.  Well, if she can’t throw her second bottle into her suitcase, then she should find the first one.  She had enough for at least three days in there.

After breakfast with Leonard, Vanya takes up the search for her other pill bottle.  She checks the area under her coatrack three times, inside her other jackets twice, and then anywhere else in the apartment that a pill bottle could conceivably have rolled to.  Vanya searches the bathroom cabinet in case one of the officers had thought she’d misplaced it, and then her bedroom for the same reason.  Nothing.

All of the good that talking to Leonard had done is washed away by the sudden, suffocating knot in her chest.  Vanya has been anxious before, but today it feels like so much _more_.  It feels closer, more real.  Her pills had probably helped with that, hadn’t they?  She tries to keep breathing evenly, hoping it’ll pass.  But now that she’s focusing on her breath, it takes thought and effort instead of coming automatically.  Vanya needs to stay calm, not just because she doesn’t want to trigger a panic attack, but because thanks to her siblings’ discovery, she has no idea what will happen if she loses control of her emotions.  Without her medication, it feels like a safety net has been pulled out from under her.

“Okay, alright,” she says to herself, sucking in deep breaths.  “It’s not the end of the world.”  Then, absurdly, she has to stifle an inappropriate titter, because she shouldn’t be laughing about an impending disaster.  “I can still make this work.  I can make it to the pharmacy before rehearsal and get something generic to get me through today.  I’ll have them refill my prescription to pick up on my way home.”

* * *

On Patch’s fourth visit to the Hargreeves mansion, her luck runs out and Diego answers the door.  “Eudora?”

“Diego.  I need to talk to your sister.  Vanya, not Allison.”

“She left.”  He flips out a knife and starts picking under his nails, still lounging in the doorway.  “How’s that investigation coming, by the way?  Any new leads?”

Patch snorts.  “Well, apart from the fact that Ms. Hargreeves was just involved in a second shootout, no.  I’d like to hear her account of the incident.”  Patch had been added to the case because of the potential connection through Vanya to the North Mill Street deaths, and after reading the reports from last night’s incident, she’s convinced that something fishy is going on.

“Hey, we told the officers who were here last night, there were –”

“Two masked intruders, yes.  And none of you know who they were or why they came here.  Honestly, Diego?  I have some serious doubts about that, given that Ms. Hargreeves said the same thing about the five professional hitmen that mysteriously slaughtered each other in her living room.”

“Listen, I don’t like Vanya, alright?  After what she said in her book, we’re not on good terms.  But I know she didn’t cause what happened last night.”

“Diego, these people didn’t target her randomly.  Whatever is going on, there is a logical explanation why they’ve attacked her twice.  If I can’t talk to her, I can’t figure out who those people are.  We’re not on opposite sides here, unless you’re covering for her.”  Which he likely is, she realizes suddenly.  Normally when Diego joins her for a case, she can’t peel him away from her long enough to investigate properly.

“I don’t know where they went, Eudora.  If I knew, I’d be there already, dragging them out from whatever hole they crawled back into.”

Patch sighs, unwilling to argue on Diego’s porch.  “Regardless, Ms. Hargreeves is key to both of these incidents.  I need to question her.  Do you know where I can find her right now?”

He shrugs.  “I’m not Vanya’s keeper.”

Good god, sometimes she wants to strangle him.  “Alright, then.  I’m sure I’ll see you around.”  Patch decides to head back to North Mill Street first before she checks the Icarus Theater.

* * *

Five has had it with MeriTech.  He’s done waiting around.  He marches back inside past the receptionist and rides the elevator up to a floor that isn’t built of glass and chrome to impress clients.  Five tracks down the room number for Lance Bigg’s secretary and, since Mrs. Danworth isn’t in yet, he jumps into the office space and switches on her computer.  He fumbles around her desk looking for a password and spots a to-do list that includes getting kibble for “Snowball”.  One attempt later, he’s into her desktop.

Five may be able to assemble and operate any weapon you throw at him, but he hasn’t used a computer since 2002.  Sorting through the folders on her hard drive one by one sounds grossly unappealing.  Instead, he opens her email to see if it can give him any hints about Lance’s clients (or any of his coworkers’ clients, for that matter).  He sees one email that’s flagged as important and he opens it to reveal a chain of emails between Mrs. Danworth and Lance about some “accounting errors” that she had noticed over the past few months.  Five knows what that means: there’s something shady going on.

He tracks down Lance coming out of the vet’s office and jumps into his car, drawing a knife.  “One chance.  That’s all you’ve got.  One chance to tell me exactly what’s going on in that lab.”

Lance, to Five’s gratification, crumples like a house of cards.  “I… I manufacture prosthetic devices for fake patients.  I bill the insurance companies and then sell them for cash on the black market.”

“Including eyeballs?” Five demands, just to make sure.  He’s not taking any chances on a miscommunication.

“Yeah,” Lance admits, “they’re my biggest seller.”  He confesses to having a list of about twenty potential buyers and says that the eye with the serial number Five gave might have already been purchased illegally.

Lance drives to the lab at knifepoint and then takes Five up to the safe, assuming (correctly) that Five can have the blade out again the moment Lance does something he doesn’t like.  He removes the list with shaking hands and passes it over to Five.

“I’m going to make a copy of this,” Five says.  “If you move from that spot, you’ll need one of your own prosthetic devices, and if you’re lucky, I’ll make it an eye.”  Five uses the copy machine in the next room and comes back to find Lance in the same position.  “Good.  If none of these people turn out to be the one I’m looking for, or if it takes too long, I’ll be back to check in with you.”

* * *

There’s a knock at Vanya’s door, which is kind of silly because her landlord is replacing the lock later today and there’s still an obvious hole.  She leaves Leonard washing the dishes and answers the door, opening it to find Detective Patch.

“Ms. Hargreeves,” Patch begins, and Vanya’s tension instantly ratchets up at the slow, soothing-a-wild-animal tone in her voice.  The fact that Patch thinks she needs that tone means something is wrong.  “I don’t want this to be difficult, but now that you are connected to two violent incidents within days of each other, I have to ask you to come in for questioning.”

“Am I under arrest for something?”

“No.  I just want to get to the bottom of this.”

“Right now?”  Patch nods.  Vanya turns back to the kitchen, where Leonard has been watching their exchange.  “Leonard?  Could you please let my family know that I’m going to be down at the police station?  In case it… takes a while.”  In case she gets arrested for five homicides and needs someone to sort out a lawyer for her.  She knows Allison has one, at least.  Maybe a lawyer could help her tell the truth without revealing Five’s part in the solders’ deaths.

“Of course, Vanya.”  He sets down the dishes and comes to collect his coat by the door.  “I’ll call them as soon as I get into the shop, alright?”

“Thank you,” she sighs, digging a receipt out of her bag to jot down the Academy’s phone number.  “I really appreciate it, Leonard.”

* * *

“It’s not so fun on the other side of the table, is it?” Hazel asks from his bed.

“I already said I’d carry the briefcase.”

“Yes, because I have a broken arm and need one hand free for a gun.  You never carry the briefcase when we have an option.”

“But I’m going to carry it now!” she says, peering around the bathroom door to glare at him.  “So why are you complaining?”

Hazel makes a distressed sound.  “I’m not.”

Cha-Cha thinks that he’s doing a lot of talking for someone who isn’t complaining.  “Stop bugging me, then.  I’m trying to scrub the blood out of our suits, which _someone_ said he was too injured to do.”

He sighs.  “I am.”  Cha-Cha gets five minutes of blessed silence before she hears: “I’m going to get doughnuts.”

“I thought you were too injured to work.”

“That’s not work, and there’s no such thing as too injured to get doughnuts.”

* * *

Vanya sits in the interrogation room for what feels like hours, waiting.  She’s not sure if this is some technique to make her uncomfortable or if Detective Patch unexpectedly got busy with something else.  Either way, she hasn’t heard anything from either Patch or her siblings, who must know by now.  They must, right?  There’s no clock in this room and she left her watch on her dresser, but it seems like she’s been here forever.

The fluorescent lights overhead are buzzing annoyingly and with nothing else going on in the room, it’s all she can hear.  The room feels too small, like the walls are slowly pushing in, and being in a closed, windowless space feels familiar in a way she doesn’t like.  She remembers the blueprints again, the room her father built to keep her in check, and she grips the table harder.  Don’t get angry.  Don’t get upset.

It’s just, it’s not _fair_ that she has to sit like this, afraid to feel anything at the risk of damaging the room and people around her, when her brothers and sister were trained their whole lives to be in control.  They’d reached different levels of success, sure, but Dad had made the decision for her when she was four and then never reconsidered.  It’s just one more thing he has to answer for.

Thinking about Dad is a mistake, because her indignation builds and that buzzing from the lights won’t _stop_ and suddenly she looks up and something _happens_ and the lights all burst at once.  Vanya shouts and covers her head as glass rains down from the ceiling.  She stumbles out of her seat and steps around the fallen glass to knock on the door to the interrogation room.  It’s at least a minute before someone answers, and it’s an officer she doesn’t know.

“I think there was a power surge,” she lies hoarsely.

She must look upset enough, though, because he buys it.  “Let me bring you to another room and we’ll get this cleaned up,” he says, clearly stunned by the wreckage.

* * *

Most of Klaus’ siblings split up the list of black-market buyers for investigation.  Shockingly, Klaus manages to get out of this task by pointing out that he has a better chance of finding the _places_ where folks might go to buy illegal things, rather than finding random people.  He has some experience with finding those kinds of places, after all.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to help.  He does.  Klaus has an interest in seeing what the future holds now that he’s found a cute, kind man who doesn’t think Klaus is an irredeemable fuckup.  It’s just that Klaus knows Luther is going to come back with answers immediately, Allison can rumor people into telling her whatever she needs to know, and Diego and Five can both threaten like nobody’s business.  Klaus knows he’s going to be the last one looking and the rest of them are going to get impatient.  He doesn’t need to be bad at something else.

Five interrupts the conversation to say, “Hold up, has anyone seen Vanya recently?  She’s been gone a long time.  Does anyone know how long her rehearsals are?”

“I can’t imagine they go all day,” Allison replies, brow furrowed in worry.

Diego looks up from the names on his list.  “Shit, Eudora.  She was gonna question Vanya about last night and the shit that went down at her place.  She might have brought her down to the station.”

“Right, and was anyone going to mention that Vanya was apparently in a shootout at her apartment?” Allison demands.  “Because yesterday was the first I heard of it, and with everything that we had going on, no one has offered details.”

“Jesus Christ, there were only five soldiers,” Five tells them.  “I dealt with it.  Vanya wasn’t even involved at all.”

“Oh, well if there were only five hitmen, I guess that’s fine,” Klaus replies.  “Man, it’s like, only call me when there’s at least ten, you know?”

“We don’t have time for jokes, Klaus.”

“Don’t talk about Luther like that, he’s doing his best.”

“ _Klaus._ ”

Allison interrupts before the conversation can devolve any further.  “I think we should figure out what’s going on with Vanya.  If she’s being questioned at the police station, she’s probably stressed.  And we need to make sure they haven’t arrested her or anything.  I can take the family car over.”

“Shit,” Five says, “I knew there was something I forgot at Vanya’s.  The car is still parked in front of her building.”

“I’ll take my car,” Diego offers.  “I already know Detective Patch.”

“Isn’t she your ex, though?” Klaus asks.

Luther clears his throat.  “Maybe we should all go.”

From the seat by the windows, Ben makes a noise of disagreement.  “That might be worse.  If five former superheroes all storm the station, it might look like you’re trying to start a fight.”  Klaus repeats his words to the rest of them.

Five stands up, drawing everyone’s attention.  “Alright, we’ll all drive over there, but only two of us will go into the station.  Allison, you come with me.  Use your rumors or just dazzle them with your stardom, whatever works.”

* * *

“She didn’t do it,” Allison insists again at the station, after using neither her fame nor her supernatural powers of persuasion.

Five watches Patch takes a deep breath (and then another) to calm herself.  “Something happened for those five men to end up dead, and Ms. Hargreeves – the other Ms. Hargreeves, that is – knows more than she’s told me.  I was called away for another case that I’m leading, and I’m genuinely sorry for the wait, but I truly just want to ask her some questions.”

“Look, we need to get her out of here right now.  It’s a matter of her safety.”

“You don’t dictate to me.  That’s not how this works.  You two?  Are _definitely_ related to Diego.”

“Hey!” Five and Allison both exclaim.

Fives knows that they need to regroup.  He excuses them both with a quick “Can we have a moment?” to Patch and leads Allison a few steps away.  “We don’t have time for this,” he murmurs.  “There are only five more days left and there are twenty-four people we need to look into.”

“Then tell the detective what happened.  The worst-case scenario is that they arrest you, but there’s no cell in the world that could hold you.”

“I don’t need more people on my tail,” Five growls.

Allison raises her eyebrows.  “Do you think this will go any faster if Vanya has people on her tail instead?  Your skillset is a little more tailored to this.”

“Maybe so, but as soon as I say ‘time travel’, no one will believe me.  I can show them evidence of teleportation, but time travel is a different kettle of fish.”

“So create an edited version of the truth.  I thought you were supposed to be clever,” she baits.  “Vanya is on the hook for this until they can find some other party with motive to – you know.  And these Commission people aren’t going to have enemies that the police can track down here in 2019.  She’s stuck.”

He knows all of this, but he’d much rather just break Vanya out of the police station than go through the proper channels.  “Fine.  _Fine_.”  In the interest of freeing his sister correctly and preventing her from bringing the building down around their ears, he walks back over to Patch.  Being honest is the worst and it doesn’t even help that Delores would be proud of him.  “I’d like to make a statement about the incident at Vanya’s apartment.”

“You would?”

Ugh.  Now he just wants to get it out as fast as possible.  “I was visiting Vanya that night and those men were tracking me.  Not her.  When they showed up at the door, she went into the bathroom and locked the door.  By now you must have gotten a ballistics report and you’ll see that all of the shots fired at those men came from their own guns.  If you’re going to blame anyone for the deaths, blame them.  They were gunning for me and I just dodged.  I didn’t make anyone shoot at me.”

Patch’s eyebrows jump.  “You just dodged.”  She pauses and then seems to remember that she’s talking to Diego’s brother.  “Okay, I’m going to need to take a written statement from you, and I’ll need to see some ID.”

“I’ve been away for forty-five years.  I don’t have any ID.”

“Right, you’ve been gone.  Diego mentioned something like that.  There must be something to prove who you are.”

Five had never had his fingerprints taken as a kid, but – “How about dental work?  I’m sure Dad still had all of our medical records when he kicked the bucket.”

Patch sighs but leads him to her desk to find the right form.  “That should be fine.  Any insight on why five – no, seven – unknown assailants are after you?”

Like Five is going to tell her that he’s on the run from his job as a temporal assassin.  Either she won’t believe him, or she’ll put out a warrant for his arrest.  “If I knew that, they wouldn’t be unknown assailants, would they?”

Her eyes narrow.  “Smartass doesn’t translate well to written statements.”

“Then no, I don’t know who sent them.  Look, when I lived here, the Umbrella Academy was launched as a crime deterrent.  Criminals tend to dislike that.”

* * *

It takes time for someone to x-ray Five’s teeth and compare them to the old records.  Finally, though, Patch declares all of the paperwork acceptable and comes back from one of the interview rooms with Vanya.

“Why didn’t you call the house?” Allison asks when Vanya reaches them.  “If Five hadn’t noticed that you were running way late from rehearsal, it might have been longer before we thought to go looking.”

Vanya frowns.  “Leonard said he was going to call you guys.”

“Leonard?”

“One of my new students, he’s about our age.  If he didn’t call you guys, though… I hope he’s alright.  He’s a good guy.”

Allison doesn’t think much of a man who fell through on a simple task that was as important as this.  “I’m sure he’s fine.  Let’s go, the others are waiting.”

“Are they still in the car?” Five asks, surprised.

“Yes and no.  I checked up on them while you got your teeth photographed.  Diego kicked Luther and Klaus out after a game of I Spy almost led to bloodshed.”

“Ah,” Five says knowingly, “it turned into ‘I spy the mayor of idiot town’, didn’t it?”

“Close.  Klaus kept sniping at pedestrians’ bad fashion choices and Diego and Luther couldn’t agree on whether a parked Volkswagen was green or blue.”

Allison is relieved when Vanya laughs as the three of them start towards the entrance.

* * *

The dinner table is quiet (whether out of habit or because Mom’s chicken divan is even better than usual) when Vanya gathers the courage to ask: “Can I see Dad’s notebooks?”

A few of the siblings exchange looks.  “Why?” Diego asks suspiciously.

“I want to know what he tried.  What I can do.  I think today made it clear that I need to learn control, regardless of whether I plan to use my powers.”  And it’s still so strange to say “my powers” after a lifetime of being told that she had none.

Her medication must have been strong, if she’d caused that mess in the interrogation room by _accident._ However, she can’t rely on her pills forever.  What if she ends up somewhere without them again?  What if there are long-term side effects from twenty-five years of a medication that she doesn’t need?

“Good on you for getting your act together, sis,” Klaus says.  “I wouldn’t want to, but I’m glad you do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I say it every chapter, but I truly do appreciate all of your support. Thank you for commenting!!
> 
> Tell me what you liked about this chapter! This one had a few moments of humor and I'd love to hear about whether it made you laugh.


	6. T-minus 4 Days to the Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can tell by my update speed how much I’m procrastinating on my thesis.
> 
> On another note, just to be clear, there’s still no incest despite mentions of Allison and Luther being close. They are close because they are siblings and hung out together as kids.

Luther stops Vanya the next morning as she tries to leave for rehearsal.  “It’s not safe to go out alone,” he tells her, and it feels like an olive branch after their last blowout argument.  “Both of those assassins got away after we threw everything we had at them.  They’re still out there, and from what Five said, they have it out for anyone trying to stop the apocalypse.”

Vanya opens her mouth to say that she was fine yesterday, but then remembers that she spent most of yesterday at the police station.  “I have a concert in four days,” she replies instead.  “I missed yesterday’s rehearsal and I won’t keep my spot in the orchestra if I skip two days in a row so close to a performance.”

“I understand, but there’s also the fact that… Vanya, if half of what Dad wrote about was true, you could easily hurt people until you learn discipline.  I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s true.”

“I know,” she says, trying to be civil and still stand her ground, “and I’ve thought about this.  If my power is connected to my emotional state, then doing something that feels good and calms me down will lower the chances that I do something drastic.  Right?”

Surprisingly, Luther actually thinks about that for a minute.  “That’s… well, how about this?  I’ll walk you to rehearsal.  Or take the bus with you, whichever.  Then you’ll get there safely and I’ll already be out and can look into the people on Five’s list.  I want to know whether they live in town or if I have to get in touch over the phone.”

“If you drop me off at rehearsal, then you’ll be walking around the city alone,” she points out, although she knows that Luther is strong enough to take care of himself.

“Allison can come with me and we’ll work on our lists together.”

Vanya hides an amused smile.  “That works out nicely, doesn’t it?”  It doesn’t seem polite to have “favorite” siblings, but there’s no denying that Luther and Allison got along best with each other.  “Why don’t we come up with a schedule?  We’ll figure out who’s going where when and we can use the buddy system.”

* * *

Dave is about ten pages into Vanya’s memoirs when Klaus finds him curled up on the couch in the living room.  “What’s cooking, good-looking?” Klaus asks, chewing on a twizzler.

Dave grins and shows him the cover.  “You never told me you were a superhero.”  He’d pieced it together from the Hargreeves’ response to any and all forms of danger (including the impending apocalypse), but seeing a book that spelled it out had intrigued him.

Klaus’ smile vanishes.  “Don’t read that.”  His voice is so dull that Dave immediately sets the volume down.

“I’m sorry.  It was sitting on one of the end tables and it caught my eye.”

“Yeah, well.  Vanya said a lot of nasty things to get back at our dear old dad, and the rest of us got dragged into it.”

Yikes.  “If you don’t want me to read her version, will you tell me about it?”

“It’s kind of a bummer.”

“I’d still like to hear it if you want to tell it.”  Dave can see Klaus wavering, so he adds: “If you’d rather not do it here, we can find a park or just circle the block.”

“This is going to be a sad, weird date,” Klaus warns.

Dave can’t keep the smile off his face at the word “date”.  “I’m willing to take that chance.”

Klaus throws on a coat and offers Dave a jacket from Diego’s closet.  He claims that Diego gave him permission to share, and Diego hasn’t said anything yet about Dave borrowing his black turtlenecks, so Dave accepts.  They stroll down to Silver Creek Park and buy burritos from the food truck outside the gates.

“Teen superheroes?” Dave prompts once they’ve found a bench and finished off their food.  “Like in the comics?”

“They had comics back in your day?” Klaus jokes, and Dave laughs.

“Yes, Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and so on.  I’m sure you have more now.”

Klaus hums.  “I guess you could say I’m like Spiderman, except instead of a spidey-sense, I have more of an I-see-dead-people Sixth Sense type of deal – although actually, you probably haven’t seen that movie.  And instead of the ability to shoot cool webs, I attract the attention of every dipshit spook in the city who wants to cure their boredom or existential dread by scaring the pants off a medium.”  He says it with a light tone, but the undercurrent of bitterness is clear.

Dave tries to move away from that minefield.  “What about the Umbrella Academy?  What sort of cases did you take?”

“Whatever missions Dad felt like sending us on.”

“There must have been at least one good story.”

Klaus pauses.  “Well, alright.  Not to brag, but we did save all of Paris once.”  When Dave raises his eyebrows, Klaus continues: “What happened was – and this is going to sound like sci-fi comics bullshit – the Eiffel Tower went nuts.  It wasn’t a monument so much as, uh, a spaceship.  We saved some people that the pilot was chucking off the tower before the whole thing flew away.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I promise I’m not.”  Klaus grins, and Dave loves it.  “I can show you the newspaper clippings that our dad kept.”

“I guess I waited too long to visit France.”

“Oh, they built another one on the same spot, but it was under much more supervision from the city.  There were no rocket scientists allowed on the architects’ team or the construction crews.”

“Good god.  So, what happened after it left?”

“We got ice cream and a key to Paris.”

Klaus is still smiling, and it fills Dave with a familiar contentment that he wants to bask in.  He reaches over and links their hands together.  “Sounds like a good day.”

Klaus tentatively squeezes his hand.  “It was.”

“Tell me about your other good days.”

* * *

When Vanya gets paged to the theater coordinator’s office during her lunch break, she assumes that the phone call is from one of her siblings.  She takes the receiver with a smile to the secretary, turns around for some semblance of privacy, and says: “I can’t leave for apocalypse prevention until after three, and then I have to give lessons at the house at seven.”

“Hello, Vanya?  This is Leonard Peabody.”

Vanya remembers his broken promise from yesterday.  “Oh.”  Part of her is stung by what feels like a betrayal.  She had relied on him, and he’d failed.  However, another part of her wants to hear what kept him from following through on his word.

“How are you doing today?  Did things go alright with the detective?”

“Things are fine now,” Vanya answers, confused.  If Leonard hadn’t forgotten about his promise, then what happened?  “You didn’t call the Academy, though.  Did something come up?”

“What are you talking about?  I did call the house, Vanya.”

“Allison said you didn’t.”

“I left a message for them the moment I got into Imperial Woodwares.  They must not have checked the machine.”

“Oh,” Vanya says again, but this time she’s filled with relief.  She hasn’t misjudged Leonard.  It was just a simple misunderstanding.  “Well, I’m glad to hear that.”

“Me too.  While I have you on the phone, are we still on for lessons this Sunday?”

“We should be,” Vanya responds, although it’s cutting things close to the apocalypse deadline.  She might have to bail if Five figures out what’s going to happen and the six of them need to move quickly.  “I have a late rehearsal to prep for the concert on Monday, but I should be there on time.”

“Great.  If you’re still getting things repaired in your apartment, we could meet at my workshop again.  It’s closed on Sundays, so we should be fine.”

“That works for me.”

“Glad to hear it.  Can I pick you up from the theater?  I’ll be on that side of town.”

“Actually, on Sunday I think Allison and Dave are going to swing by to bring me over.”

“Dave?”  Leonard pauses.  “I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”

“I’m not.  He’s…” Vanya hesitates, because she doesn’t know how open Klaus and Dave want to be about their relationship.  “He’s my brother’s guest.”

“Good,” he says quickly.  “I knew it was a long shot to, um, assume you were single, but I had hoped you weren’t seeing anyone.  Someone as talented as you are must attract a lot of attention.”

She shakes her head.  “People don’t tend to notice me.”

“Their loss.”

A charged silence sits between them for a few moments.  Awkwardly, Vanya returns to the previous topic.  “The two of them will take the bus with me.  We’ve been having some trouble with old enemies of the Umbrella Academy lately,” which isn’t strictly true but it’s easier to explain than time-travelling assassins, “so, safety in numbers, you know?”

Leonard hums.  “Old enemies returning, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I see.  Well if it’s a safety concern, then I guess I’ll see you at the workshop instead.”  He hesitates for a moment, and then says, “I’m really looking forward to it, Vanya.”

* * *

“So,” Five starts after jumping into the office, “do you have any news?”

“Stop popping past the security team!” Lance hisses as he leans back in his seat away from Five.

“You wouldn’t let me in.”

“Yes, because you’re harassing me.  And no, to answer your question for the third time today, the eyeball has not sold.  Just please leave the premises, alright?  God, if there’s such a problem with the eyeball, I can destroy it myself if you want.”

“Destroy it and you won’t live to see next week.”

What he means is that the eye is his best lead on stopping the apocalypse, but Lance takes it as a threat to his well-being and Five doesn’t correct him.

* * *

“Are you getting doughnuts _again?_ ”

“They’re good doughnuts,” Hazel defends.  “And I was planning on bringing back coffee for the two of us.”

Cha-Cha can’t wait to be done with this assignment.  Hazel says that the painkillers are numbing his arm pretty well, so they’ll keep watching the mansion and they’ll be ready.  As soon as any of the Hargreeves come out alone – except for Number Five, who can apparently hop from his doorstep directly into a cab – they’ll strike.

* * *

The plan is for Five to meet up with Diego, Luther, and Allison back at the house and discuss their progress on finding the buyer for the eye.  However, as soon as he jumps into the room, Five is met with three grim expressions that mirror his own.  It’s clear that they’ve turned up nothing so far on the twenty-four names.

“I talked to three of my six today,” Allison starts.  “Two of them were women in their eighties, a gardener and a retired science teacher.  The third was thirty-four, but I couldn’t find a motive or a method for a hockey player to cause the level of destruction we’re looking for.”

Luther nods.  “The closest I have to a lead is an engineer at NASA.  I know a lot of the folks over there from the training I did before going into space, but he wasn’t someone I ever ran into.  He would have access to a lot of rocket fuel, but not enough for an explosion that would wipe out the planet.”

Diego scowls.  “Nothing from me.  I talked to a construction worker, a ten-year-old, a computer geek, and a wedding planner.  They were all clean.”

“No one I investigated today has any motive or opportunity either.”  Five is very aware of the fact that they’re running out of time and he needs a better plan ASAP.  “We’ll just have to keep looking.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Eiffel Tower spaceship is comic canon, apparently, and Reginald had a newspaper clipping in his office during the show, so some version of the story must be show canon too.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has commented so far. I love reading everything you have to say!!
> 
> What did you think of Dave and Klaus’ date? It went in a different direction than I expected. Are you worried about Hazel and Cha-Cha? Let me know!


	7. T-minus 3 Days to the Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your patience while I finish up my thesis. I hope to have the next chapter up soon!!

Vanya comes back from her rehearsal looking happier than Allison can remember ever seeing her.  Even Five, who’d escorted her to and from the Icarus Theater today with Klaus, looks less grumpy than usual.  “What’s got you in such a good mood?”

“I got first chair,” she gushes.

Allison doesn’t know what that means, but behind Vanya, Klaus is holding both thumbs up and Five is nodding at Allison.  “Wow, Vanya, congratulations.”

“Thanks.  They were holding auditions for the spot because Helen skipped practice a few days in a row and I just tried for it.  And I got it!”

Allison picks up on the word “auditions” and understands.  “That’s great.  We should ask Mom to make a cake.”

“I’d like that.  I –” and here she looks away uncertainly, “I have tickets saved if any of you want to go.  You would just need to give your names at the ticket booth on Monday.”

This concert must be a big deal to her.  “Yeah.  As long as the apocalypse is averted, I’ll be there.”  Klaus and Five echo her agreement before moving further into the mansion.

“Great.”  Vanya takes in Allison’s jacket and shoes.  “Are you going somewhere?”

“Just to the corner store, no big deal.  We’re out of coffee again and Mom’s grocery delivery doesn’t come until Sunday.”

* * *

Across the street in a rental car, Cha-Cha watches Allison Hargreeves leave the mansion alone.  “Thank God.  I thought we were gonna have to grab two of them.  Hazel, pass me the earplugs.”

“Pass the what?  I can’t hear you,” Hazel jokes.

Cha-Cha glares at him. “Hazel.”

“I’m done now, it’s out of my system.”  He passes the earplugs.  “We lucked out with this one.  Once we gag her, she’s powerless.”

“Number Four or Number Seven would have been fine too.  No combat powers.  But you’re right, we can handle one little actress with our eyes closed.”

Hazel chuckles.  “Don’t you mean with our ears –”

“Don’t push it.”  She moves the car down the street ahead of where Allison is walking.  Cha-Cha puts in the earplugs and Hazel does the same, though because of his arm cast she has to help him pull on his mask.

The timing on this has to be tight, so they wait until Cha-Cha gives Hazel the signal.  As one, they get out of the car.  Cha-Cha pulls out the cloth with chloroform and Hazel moves to open the backseat door.  Allison spots them and her eyes widen in alarm.  She opens her mouth, but Cha-Cha can’t hear what she says.  It only takes a few moments to reach her, and by the time Allison realizes that her powers didn’t work, the cloth is already over her face and Cha-Cha is dragging her to the backseat of the car.

They drive back towards the Umbrella Academy and Cha-Cha slows the car.  Hazel gets out, rings the doorbell three times in quick succession, and leaves a note in the mail slot.  He slides back into the car and Cha-Cha is pulling away before his seat belt is even buckled.  Everything is already set up at the motel for the ambush, so they just have to get there and get Allison into their room as the bait.

* * *

Diego is pouring himself a glass of water in the kitchen when Mom walks in with a frown.  “Someone rang the doorbell three times.  They must’ve been in a hurry for you to get their letter, although it seems silly that they didn’t stay to chat.”  He sets the glass down and accepts the envelope, slicing it open with one of his smaller blades.  The note, in handwritten sharpie letters, reads: _Your sister says hi._   He flips it over.  _Five, come alone to the motel if you want her and our other hostages at South City Hospital to live_.  Diego checks the envelope again and a matchbox for the Luna Motor Lodge Motel falls out.  The number “237” is written across the top.

“Mom, did you see who was at the door?”

“No, sweetheart.  I was dusting the bookshelves in the library.”

“One of the girls is in trouble.”  He darts out of the room and heads for the mission alarm lever.

* * *

“We’ll get at most three of them,” Hazel says, “but probably just Number Five.”  Splitting up the Umbrella Academy’s forces was a good idea.  Number Four and Number Seven are insignificant in terms of combat, but Number One, Number Two, and Number Five are going to give them a tough fight.  By presenting them with a second location, the Umbrella Academy will have to make a choice about who is going where.  Five will come to them because of the note, and either one or two of his brothers will go to the hospital.

Cha-Cha nods.  “Number Five works alone.  We’re not getting any more than him.”

* * *

“Hazel and Cha-Cha are splitting us up,” Five states as he reads the letter.  “Damn, they’re good.”

“Maybe, but they’re too ambiguous,” Klaus complains from over his shoulder.  “The language isn’t clear about whether Allison will be at the hospital with the other hostages, or at the motel.”

“There may not actually be other hostages.”

“We can’t take the chance that they’re bluffing,” Luther points out.  “Some of us will have to check the hospital over.”

Vanya raises her hand.  “Can we call the police?  This note is physical proof that someone is after Five.”

“I’ll handle it,” Diego says.

Five frowns.  “I’m taking the motel, obviously.  Luther, Diego, two sets of eyes are better than one.  I know the cops will have a bomb squad for the hospital, but if Hazel and Cha-Cha try something funny there, we need to be able to react.  Klaus?”

“Yeah?”

Five pauses, unsure what to do with him.  “Take your pick.”

“I’ll go to the motel.  You could use four more eyes.”

“Two more eyes.”

“Right, that’s what I said.  Because I, who am only one person, have two eyes.”

Five dismisses Klaus’ weirdness and then they all look at Vanya, who’s had no combat training in her life.  “I’ll hold down the fort,” she says.  “Give them hell.”

* * *

Allision feels groggy when she drifts back to consciousness.  Wherever she is, it’s dim, which is better for her headache.  There’s some natural light that thin curtains can’t block, and when her eyesight adjusts, a motel room comes into focus in front of her.  She tugs at the ropes around her wrists behind her, but no dice.  There’s no give in the ropes around her ankles either.  Allison makes a frustrated noise, but the gag negates any chance that she could rumor one of her captors.

Fine.  She can do this the hard way.  Allison’s extraordinary powers aren’t her only skill.  As the only girl who had fought crime in the Umbrella Academy, she had been kidnapped from missions a few times by criminals who thought that being a girl made her the weakest member.  She has some experience with escaping people who underestimate her.  Plus, she’s picked up some ideas from acting jobs.  Lana Tarot, her character in _The Witch’s Magic Eye_ (2015), had been tied up in the villain’s office and later escaped by cutting the ropes on the corner of a desk.  Allison just needs to find a conveniently-placed piece of furniture.

“Don’t bother,” someone says to her left.  There’s a woman tucked behind the TV stand with her weapon drawn, and she’s wearing the same suit that the pink-masked assassin was wearing earlier.  “We’re not going anywhere until Five shows up.”  From where Allison is situated in the open coat closet, she can see the other hitman partially hidden in the door to the bathroom.

Allison runs through the woefully short list of what she had on her when the two of them jumped her: jacket, wallet, and keys.  Even if the assassins haven’t taken her keys, they aren’t sharp enough to do anything to the ropes.  She flexes her fingers behind her – oh.  They didn’t take her rings, that’s interesting.  She’d put six of them on this morning and she remembers that the stylized silver bird on her right hand has sharp edges.

As slowly as she can manage, Allison works the ring into a better position and starts to saw.

* * *

Klaus follows along as Five steals the guest register from the Luna Motor Lodge Motel’s front desk.  “The Commission only booked them one room,” Five says.

“So?  We already know what room they’re in,” Klaus points out.

“We know where the trap is,” Five corrects.  “I wanted to make sure that they don’t have Allison stowed somewhere else in the motel.”

That makes sense.  “Okay, so what’s the plan?  Walk straight into the trap?  That seems like a poor choice.”

“I could take them out one at a time if I knew where they were in the room and where Allison is.”

Klaus glances over at Ben.  “I think I can help with that.”

Ben snorts.  “Taking credit for my work again?”

“Chill out, Allison is your sister too.”

“Of course she is, dumbass,” Five retorts, assuming that Klaus is talking to him.  “How can you help?”

Klaus refocuses on Five.  “If you think that no one has died at this motel, brother mine, you would be sorely mistaken.  Ghosts love to spill their guts, metaphorically speaking.”

“You can get them to tell you where Hazel and Cha-Cha are?  Not a bad plan.”  That’s high praise from Five, who couldn’t give compliments like a normal person to save his life.

Klaus and Five wait down the hall while Ben phases through the door of Room 237.  He pops back out after a few seconds.  “Allison is tied to a chair in the closet near the back of the room.  One of them is crouched behind the TV stand and the other is behind the cover of the bathroom wall.”  Klaus relays the information to Five.

“You should stay out here, Klaus.”

“What?  No way.  You can only attack one of them at a time and Allison might get hurt.  You said these guys were good at their job.”

Five rolls his eyes.  “I’ll get Allison out first, obviously.  They’re counting on the fact that I don’t know where she is.  In the few seconds it will take me to find her in the room, that’s when they’ll fire.”  Without waiting for a reply, Five jumps with a _bamf_.  An instant later, Klaus hears gunfire and then Allison and Five are abruptly in front of him.  A second after that, Five is gone again.

Klaus pulls the gag up and then off her head.  “You don’t look any worse for wear.”

“Thanks.  I was halfway through the rope, but I hadn’t figured out how I was going to get out of the room.”

He circles the chair and pulls out the pocket knife he’d found in a junk drawer.  “No worries, Al, I’m here to save the day.”  He frees her hands and has just started on her feet when the door to 237 flies open.  Klaus jerks back, but it’s only Five.

“Help me search for a remote.  If they weren’t bluffing about the hostages, their setup at the hospital might have been remote-controlled.”

“Do you think they had time to set something up?” Allison asks.

“They had two whole days where we didn’t hear from them.  Anything’s possible.”

Klaus finishes on the other set of ropes and helps Allison to her feet.  “What about the assassins?”

“They’re knocked out.  I don’t know all of their plans yet.”  The three of them troop into the room and Five takes a few minutes to tie the unconscious assassins to the radiator.

* * *

A thorough search of the room turns up briefcase 3876, but no remote.  Five groans in frustration and kicks one of the beds.  “I can’t do this indefinitely.  The Commission will keep sending assassins until one of them gets lucky, and while I’m busy dodging bullets, I can’t figure out who triggers the apocalypse.”  He rubs his temples.  “Okay, alright, I need a plan.  Hazel and Cha-Cha know the password for contacting the Handler.  I can make a deal with her to end this.”

“What kind of deal?” Allison asks.

Probably a Faustian one, but Five will tackle that after the apocalypse.  “Depends on what she wants.”

By the time Hazel and Cha-Cha start to come around, Five has removed their earplugs and has them at gunpoint.  “Allison, would you do the honors?”

Allison purses her lips, looking conflicted, but ultimately she sighs and says, “I heard a rumor that you answered all of our questions and told the whole truth for the next twenty minutes.”  Cha-Cha swears under her breath.

Five starts the interrogation.  “Did you do anything to the hospital or compel anyone else to do so?”

“No, it was just a ruse,” Cha-Cha grits out.  Five looks over at Klaus, who takes the hint and leaves to find a landline to update the police.

“Do you have any other plans?”

“To get out of my contract,” Hazel says, drawing Five’s complete attention.  That hadn’t been what Five meant, but that’s the consequence of asking vaguely worded questions.

“Explain.”

“I’m looking to quit the Commission.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say I have a vested interest in a doughnut shop.”

Five doesn’t let himself relax just yet.  “Well, you attacked our house, tried to kill my family, and kidnapped my sister.”

Hazel shrugs his shoulders.  “There’s not much I can do about the past.  Don’t forget I’m not the only killer in this room.  You got your own bloody history, pal.”

He considers this.  “I can sympathize with wanting to break your contract.”  Most of the staff in the Corrections division are people who had no other option but to accept the Commission’s job offer.  “I’ll tell you what.  I don’t take pleasure in killing.  If you can promise me while under Allison’s compulsion that you will not harm my family or convince anyone else to harm my family, I’ll let you go once I’ve spoken to the Handler.”  Hazel dutifully repeats the promise back to him.  Satisfied, Five turns his eyes on Cha-Cha.  “And what’s your position on the matter?”

“I won’t stop until I complete my assignment, Number Five.”

“Unfortunate.  Tell me the most current password for getting in touch with the Handler.”  She rattles off a string of numbers that Five memorizes.  That done, he lowers the gun and leaves the room.

He finds Klaus hanging up the phone at the end of the hall.  “Hey, I can handle making a single phone call, Five.  No need to micromanage.”

Five shakes his head.  “I need to place a different call.”

* * *

Allison is left alone with the two assassins.  “You really don’t want to hurt us anymore?” she asks Hazel.

“No.  I admit that I regret some of the things I did as part of carrying out this assignment.”

That should be enough, but an irrational part of her is still convinced that the moment she unties him, he’ll take it back.  He’d promised them under her rumor, but there may have been loopholes that Five hadn’t thought of.  She hesitates until she hears sirens and realizes that if she’s going to let him out, it has to be before the police get here.  Allison crouches down and unties him, quickly leaping back into a defensive position as the last rope falls.

Hazel doesn’t kill her.  He stands up, brushes off his pants, and walks out the door without another word.

“You’ve made an enemy,” Cha-Cha bites out, glaring at her.  “The Commission can free me from prison at any time and I will not forget what happened here.”

Allison sets her jaw.  “We’ll be waiting.”

* * *

Time freezes.  Five turns around from the phone to see Klaus paused mid-step down the hallway and a bird over the parking lot suspended in the air.  There’s something wrong with the sky.

“Hello, Five.”  It’s the Handler.

He faces her and skips the pleasantries.  “I want you to put a stop to the apocalypse.”

She clasps her hands behind her back, briefcase still in hand.  “What you’re asking for is next to impossible, even for me.  What’s meant to be is meant to be.”

Well, Five has spent enough time in the field, wading through different eras and fixing so-called mistakes, to know that people make their own choices.  From where he stands, “destiny” is just another word for the decisions that further the Commission’s agenda.

“‘Next to’ impossible implies that you can do it.  What will it take for you call it off?”

“Hmm.”  She pretends to think about it.  “Well, part of the reason I’m here is that we want to offer you a new position back at the Commission, in management this time.”  Signing a new contract is about what Five had expected, but the new position is not.  It doesn’t seem wise to rehire a deserter and then give him more power.  Five had expected to be signing his soul away, so to speak.

“If I accept this position, I want my family to survive.”

The Handler hums noncommittally.  “All of them?”

“Yes, all of them.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”  Five narrows his eyes at the evasion.  She hasn’t agreed to anything yet.  “Do we have a deal?”

“I’d like a written contract.  Once we agree on all of the terms, then we’ll have a deal.”  However, he still takes her hand and lets the world vanish around them in blue sparks.

* * *

“So,” Klaus says to Ben as the cop cars screech into the motel’s parking lot, “Do you think we should do something with this briefcase?”

“Don’t open it.”

“Aw, shucks, you’ve ruined my weekend plans.  Seriously, should we take it with us?”

Ben bites his lip.  “I don’t think we should leave a time machine in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they have.”  Shit, that’s a good point.  Plus, from what Five has described, the Commission is already a time-travelling police force that let power go to their heads.  No need to add to that.

“I can see why it’s tempting,” Klaus says idly, crouching down in front of the briefcase and running a finger across the handle.  “I know exactly what day I’d go back to.”

“I don’t want to know.  The more you talk about it, the more you’ll want to go.”

“Hey, I learned my lesson from the other-timeline-me,” Klaus insists, although it has in fact occurred to him that his last trip with a time machine had apparently landed him a boyfriend.

“I swear to god, if you open those latches, I will find you in the afterlife and make you absolutely miserable.”

“And that’s different from the current sitch how?”

“Klaus!”

Look, Klaus isn’t gonna go anywhere.  Five had done that and look at how he’d ended up: old and cranky.  But Ben really seems to believe that Klaus is thinking about it, and Klaus is not one to miss an opportunity to rile up his brother.  Being a pest is the solemn duty of a sibling, after all.  “Oooh, look at me, I’m getting clooooser to the latches and you can’t stooop me.”  He waggles his fingers over the briefcase for effect.

“I will end you.”

“Give it your best shot, Benny.”

Ben makes that frustrated, exasperated growl that only siblings can provoke, and he reaches forward to shove Klaus away from the briefcase –

And Klaus goes sprawling back.

His gaze snaps up to Ben’s and he is met with a wide-eyed, surprised stare.  His brother clearly hadn’t been expecting that to happen either.  Ben looks down at his hands like he’s never seen them before, and then back up at Klaus.

Klaus’ mouth opens and closes, shocked.  “You just Patrick Swayzeed me!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to everyone who has commented so far. I really love reading your reactions to this story. Are you all as excited as I am about old man Five going to the Commission?
> 
> In case it was not obvious, the film that Allison mentions --The Witch’s Magic Eye (2015) -- is not a real movie.


	8. T-minus 2 Days to the Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your patience while I worked on this chapter :)

The Handler is playing a game with him and Five doesn’t know what it is.  What are the chances, after seeing the miles of office space for case managers, that his desk would be directly in front of the woman in charge of all apocalypse matters?  It’s suspicious, is what it is.  She’s testing him or trying to manipulate him somehow.

Also, he still has no guarantee of his family surviving the apocalypse, which is irritating.  “We’ll have your contract written up by the end of the day,” the Handler had said.  “Why don’t you get settled in and take a stab at one of your cases?  I get the feeling that you like challenges, Five.”  Five had forced a pleasant smile until she left.

If he’s being set up for something, then he needs to gather as much intel as possible about the situation.  Instead of brushing off Dot Eppstadt’s friendly greeting, Five turns around.  “I was wondering, Dot.  How did you originally find out that I was living in post-apocalypse 2019?  I’m… curious about how all this works.”

“Oh!” Dot looks pleased at his interest.  “Well, usually case managers get reports from field agents, who –”

“Where do you have field agents in the apocalypse?”

“Usually there would be field agents on the ground who pass through time normally, but the period under my jurisdiction can’t support any long-term assignments.  I have a small team who hops through and takes readings at five-year intervals, and I monitor most of the results myself from here.”

“That’s… certainly something, Dot.”  She beams at him.  “Do you like working on all apocalypse matters?”  He doesn’t care, but it sets up a few of his other questions.  If Five hadn’t been absolutely certain that the Handler is keeping an eye on him, he wouldn’t hesitate to remind Dot about his past as an assassin until she gives him everything he wants to know.  He only has two days left and subtlety is a skill that Five had never needed in an empty world.

“Yes, I’ve been keeping things running for almost eight years now.”  Or keeping things not running, as the case may be.

“It doesn’t get boring, all that rubble and dust?  No people to watch?”

“There’s always something to keep it interesting.”

Five tries not to visibly react.  “Like what?”

“Oh, sometimes I have to pull strings to make sure the end happens as it should – some of the smallest things can ripple out and change the whole timeline.  But you know that, of course, from your work in Corrections.”

“‘The kingdom was lost for the want of a horseshoe nail’,” Five agrees.  “I’m sure it takes a keen mind to spot those minor changes, Dot.  What’s the smallest thing you had to shift?”

All at once, Dot seems to realize who she’s talking to.  “We should get back to work, Five,” she says, her smile turning less genuine.  Damn.

Five works through his first case to completion and takes his orders down to the pneumatic tubes.  The Handler appears just as he tries to bypass the tube operator, Gloria, which confirms that the Handler is smart enough to not trust him.  More’s the pity.  She leads him back to the office and hands him another case file.

Dot avoids his gaze when he sits down and Five scraps his plans to engage her in another conversation.  He’s considering how to get away with rummaging through her desk when it occurs to him: eight years of files wouldn’t all be stored in her desk.  There just isn’t room for them.  That means there have to be file cabinets somewhere else in the building.

The voice of reason in his head, who frequently sounds like Delores, says: _The Handler will catch on if you wander around aimlessly opening doors.  Ask for help._

“Dot is onto me,” Five murmurs as loud as he dares, even though he’s talking to himself.  Delores is back at the Umbrella Academy.

_You have other coworkers._

That’s a fair point.  “Gene,” Five starts, turning to his neighbor on the left.  “I heard you were working on the Lusitania.”

The man looks up nervously.  “Yes, um, that’s correct.”

Five waves his new case file.  “I’ve also got something from the 1910s.  Where can I look at other Commission files from 1913?  I want to study some of our coworkers’ techniques.”

“Er, the file room has everything sorted by year and by major event.  That might be your best bet.”

“How do I get there?”

“From here it’s, uh, two lefts and then a right after the water fountain.”  Five puts his file under his arm and follows the man’s directions.  There’s a middle-aged, librarian-looking clerk at the front desk of the single largest room Five has seen in his life.  The cabinets go up at least two stories high and the aisles stretch out further than he can see.

The desk clerk looks up as he approaches.  Five forestalls any greeting by asking, “Where can I find the files organized by year?”

She points to the right.  “Every document on this half of the file room is filed by chronology, while the duplicates in the other half are sorted by the major historical events associated with each file.  What can I help you find today?”

“I’m here for 1913, but I can find my own way.”  He leaves before she can protest.  Five strolls down one of the long aisles for the 1900s for about three minutes.  Then, double-checking that no one is watching, he jumps a few aisles at a time to the other half of the file room.

After over twenty minutes of searching, Five locates the apocalypse 2019 cabinets.  He’s reaching for the far-left drawer with the oldest files when he spots an A-2019 cabinet with “Five Hargreeves | 00.05 | Number Five” typed in fading ink on a label in the front.  It’s obviously old, which is the only reason that Five decides it’s not a trap for him.  And even if it is, he’s burning with curiosity now.

Inside is evidence that the Commission has been playing God with Five’s life since he was thirteen years old.  He finds orders to remove a few key volumes on time travel theory from every library in the city and a case report from the field agent whose well-timed interference at a publishing house in 1999 changed one crucial equation in Quentin McArthur’s seminal work on time travel.  Five read that book when he was eighteen and had apparently been _so fucking close_ to cracking the equation that the Commission had sabotaged him.

If they’d been watching him all this time, why couldn’t they have brought him back?  Was it apathy?  Was it laziness or incompetence?  _Oh shoot, we forgot about that kid living in a wasteland, someone should check on him_.  Were they planning to recruit him all along, after he’d grown up into something dangerous?  Five clutches the folder tighter.  He’s never been much for arson after living in a scorched husk of a world, but right now he would do anything to watch the Commission burn to the ground.  He could have made it home in five years.  He wants to scream.

It’s so quiet in the file room that he has thirty seconds to prepare when he hears footsteps.  The click-clack of heels tells him exactly who’s coming, so Five shoves all of the paperwork back into the “Five Hargreeves” cabinet.  He opens the most recent drawer for A-2019, grabs a handful of files from the front and stuffs them under his button-up shirt, and then hastily jumps down the aisle.  When the Handler rounds the corner, Five is elbow-deep in documents about India’s independence from Britain.

“What brings you down here, Five?” the Handler asks, as if she doesn’t know.

Five holds up a folder.  “I thought one of the key figures for the Indian Independence Act of 1947 might have been present during my 1913 case, but I was wrong.”

“It happens to the best of us.  By the way, you missed the lunch bell all the way back here.  Would you like to eat with me in my office?”

“I’d be happy to,” Five grits out.

Five waits to look at the files, suffering through lunch with the Handler as they exchange pleasantries, veiled threats, and candies, and then he waits the rest of the workday too.  When his shift is finally over, the Handler leads him to the Human Resources department to look at his contract.  The terms for stopping the apocalypse are still vaguely worded and easy to evade, with an extra helping of legalese on top.  Five hands the contract back, asks for adjustments to be made by morning, and exits the office.

He hasn’t been assigned employee housing yet, so Five takes his files into the men’s room to read in a stall.  Most of the orders are for those small-scale changes that Dot was talking about, like convincing an old woman not to sell her lake house or encouraging the development of more durable bows for stringed instruments.  The Commission must have a unit that isn’t comprised entirely of assassins.  One memo, stamped “important” at the top, calls for an agent to cause a neighborhood disturbance that changes the conception date of one Harold Jenkins from January of 1989 to February 1st, 1989.  The comments section of the form reads: _See HJ’s personal connection to apocalypse catalyst WV in file folder A-2019-SBE-7._

Now _this_ is a lead.  Harold Jenkins, whoever the hell that is, has a direct connection to the cause of the apocalypse.  Five just has to find WV and this specific folder and he’ll know the exact cause.  What’s better is that he’s in a good position to go back to the file room now and search because his next shift doesn’t start for hours.  Sleep is for the weak.

Five approaches the file room, checking for the Handler all the while, and jumps past the front desk into the stacks.  He makes a bee-line for the A-2019 cabinets to begin the hunt for anything with A-2019-SBE-7.

His eyes drift to the cabinet with his name and Five remembers that he left it a mess during his hasty exit before.  If the Handler comes looking, that’s a dead giveaway that Five has been snooping around his own files.  Five opens his drawer and starts to straighten the mess of papers he’d shoved in there.  He checks a few dates on the documents to make sure they’re returned to the order they were filed in.

It’s while he’s fixing the folders that he sees one labelled “Relocation from Post-apocalypse”.  In it are two sheets of paper.  The first is a request from Dot Eppstadt to have thirteen-year-old Five returned to his place in the timeline, which makes Five feel more kindly towards her.  The other sheet is a response denying the request, and under “reasons”, the anonymous higher-up writes: _connection to WV could cause problems_.

Five’s heart skips.  The writer could be referring to anyone he’s ever met, from media personnel to villains to strangers that the Umbrella Academy has saved, but it means that the face of the apocalypse, the person he has to stop at any cost, will be someone he recognizes.

“Oh, Five,” the Handler sighs, interrupting his revelation.  Five jerks back in surprise to see her holding a briefcase, which explains how she snuck up on him.  “I’m so disappointed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you’re curious about minutia like me, in the file name “A-2019-SBE-7”, “SBE” stands for spontaneous birth event. I don’t pretend to know anything about how the file nomenclature for an outrageously large system would work.
> 
> You all have been so supportive, and I really appreciate all of your comments!! I would love to know what you think about Five’s discoveries re: the Commission’s interference in his life.


	9. T-minus 1 Day to the Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so incredibly flattered by the number of people who have subscribed to this series. Knowing that over 400 of you want to see where this story goes is a really great feeling for me as an author. You’re truly the best :)

“Hey, Vanya, I’ve been looking for you.”  She looks up from her book to see Leonard walk up from the costume storage in the depths of the theater.

“Leonard.”  She smiles, marking the page in her novel.  “What are you doing here?”

“I stopped home to pick up snacks for our lesson and this was on the way.  I took a shot in the dark that you might be on a break for dinner.”

“Just finished,” she confirms.  “I have a couple more minutes before rehearsal starts up again.”  Then she rewinds the last thirty seconds and peers behind him, confused.  “Did you get lost on your way in?  There’s nothing past the costumes.”

“Oh, I took a different entrance, that’s all.”  Huh.  Vanya didn’t think there were any external doors that way, but maybe there’s another emergency exit she doesn’t know about.  “All set to meet up after rehearsal?”  Vanya nods.  “Great.  If I can’t walk you to my workshop,” and here he holds out his arm, “at least let me walk you back to the stage.”  Vanya takes his arm with a smile.  No one else has ever seemed genuinely pleased to just _be_ with her, even if it’s only for a short moment.

She opens the auditorium door and pauses, confused.  Instead of seeing her fellow musicians settling back into their chairs, making small talk or arranging their sheet music, there seems to be a lot of noise and movement on the stage.

“Is something wrong?” Leonard asks.

“I’m not sure.”  He follows her towards the scene and stands quietly beside her.

“What’s going on?” she asks a woman from the trumpet section.

She makes a face.  “Food poisoning.  Six people have already gotten sick from something in the food delivery, and everyone else who bought the takeout is getting worried.”

“Six people?  God, I hope it’s nothing too bad.”  Vanya joins the rest in standing around while the conductor speaks to the musicians going home.  The man looks through his sheet music for a few moments, considering, and then gestures for everyone’s attention.

“I’ve decided end rehearsal early.”  Surprised murmurs start up around the stage.  “I know that it’s unprecedented, with the performance tomorrow.  However, I can only hope that with rest and recovery at home, everyone will be back tomorrow and well enough to play.”

While everyone is still whispering about the conductor’s decision, Leonard tugs at her elbow.  “C’mon, let’s get out of here, Vanya,” he says quietly.  She lets him pull her out of the auditorium, trying not to worry about the fact that she’d only earned first chair two days ago and now she has to play a solo tomorrow.

When they get to the front doors of the lobby, she stops.  “I should wait for my family.”

“They won’t be here until rehearsal was supposed to end.  We can head to the shop early and, if you’re worried, you can call them there.”

Hazel and Cha-Cha might be out of the picture, but the Commission is still a looming threat.  No one has seen Five since he left to speak with one of their representatives, the Handler.  “There are people after us.”

Leonard gives her a wry smile.  “I’m not anyone famous like the Umbrella Academy is.  I wouldn’t worry about it, Vanya – _no one_ will think to look for you at my workshop.”

* * *

Five has been playing a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek with the Handler and the Corrections division for about twelve hours now.  As someone who’d learned to sleep light and fall asleep practically anywhere, Five has managed to nap for an hour here and there holed up in the Commission’s maze of labs before they track him down and he has to move again.  He still doesn’t know how they keep finding him so quickly.  Five is running out of time to find Harold Jenkins and zero in on whoever it is they both know, because as long as the Commission is on his tail, he can’t investigate.

Although, there’s a thought.

As long as the Commission exists, he can’t stop the apocalypse.  The next logical progression of that thought is that if Five destroys the Commission, he can finish this.  Save the world.  Time travel is a useful tool, but if the organization wielding it is hell-bent on destruction, then it has to be stopped.

The three quickest, most efficient ways to cripple an organization are knocking out communications, transport, and weaponry.  That means he has to hit the tube room, the briefcase storage, and the armory.  With that decided, he jumps into a hallway at random, pulls the fire alarm, and makes a few more short jumps away from other people.  Five hits the armory first to pick up a few things and drops a grenade as he leaves.  The tube room is next, but he’s not alone when he finally lands.  The Handler is there in person, and in an instant her gun is pointed at him.

“I thought you might try something like this.”

Five remains still, but he doesn’t hold up his hands.  “It seems that this is the only way I can stop the end from coming.”

“No one can stop what’s coming.”

“A bold statement, given the effort Dot has gone through to keep the whole affair on track.  I’ve seen the files now.  She’s done eight years of work, and she wasn’t even the first case manager for the apocalypse.”

“I saved you from a lifetime of being alone,” she tells him.  “You owe me.”

“Whatever you think I owe you, it isn’t greater than the world.”  He jumps away behind a column of tubes and hears a bullet hit the wall where he’d been standing.  Five pulls the pin on his second-to-last grenade and then tosses it over in her direction.  Another jump and he’s out of the room, already running down the hall when it explodes.  He makes one last stop in the briefcase room to secure his passage back to 2019 and then leaves the last grenade ticking down on the floor.

Five knows that there are still briefcases out there with field agents on assignment, but with their communications down and only a limited number of time machines left, it will take some time for them to coordinate an army to bring down on him.

And Five only needs one day’s head start.

* * *

When Allison and Dave arrive at the Icarus Theater, ten minutes late due to a problem with one of the buses, Vanya isn’t in the lobby.  “Maybe they ran late?” Allison suggests, but she can’t hear anything coming from the auditorium.

They locate the theater coordinator’s office.  “Excuse me, but have you seen a woman with dark hair and a dark button-up shirt?  She would have been carrying a violin case.”

“The musicians left early today,” the staff member tells them.  “They ordered dinner in and got food poisoning.  There were eight cases at least by the time they all left.”

Allison turns to Dave and lowers her voice.  “She would have called us if she’d gone to the hospital for food poisoning, unless – unless Cha-Cha broke out and got to her first.  Do you think she had something to do with it?”

“After what she and her former partner tried so far, I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“Shit.  _Shit_.  Vanya doesn’t have any combat training.  Plus, Cha-Cha didn’t leave a note this time.”  Allison tries to swallow her panic.  “We should get back to the Academy in case a note shows up.”

* * *

The landline is down at Imperial Woodwares, to Vanya’s dismay.  “We’ll go next door and borrow the salon’s phone,” Leonard promises.

The tension leeches out of her shoulders at his words.  “Thanks, Leonard.  I’ll feel better after we do that.”

“And I’ll look up the number for a phone repair company and set up an appointment while we’re over there.  It was working last night, I swear.  Hey, while I’m tracking down the yellow pages, try one of the new cookies I made last night.  They’re white chocolate chip.”

Vanya thanks him and removes the tupperware from the plastic bags, popping one of the tops open and trying a large cookie.  They’re too sweet by half, she decides, but she finishes one anyway.  “Do you need help looking for the phone book?”

“No, I’ll find it.  By the way, about your family, are they… _all_ going to be at your performance tomorrow?”

Most of them had responded positively, which had been a pleasant surprise.  “Yes, I think they will.”

“Good, good.  I mean, that should be –” He cuts himself off as the doorbell rings.

“I thought you were closed on Sundays.”

Leonard frowns.  “We are.  The sign is on the door and we’re not expecting any special deliveries.”  The bell rings again.  “You can unpack your violin, I’ll just go see what they want.”

Vanya doesn’t pay much attention as the shop’s door squeals open and she hears Leonard start to give a general greeting.  However, his words are followed by a loud _smack_ that startles her and she whips around to see three very tall figures with their faces covered.  One of them has just hit Leonard over the head with one of the carved wooden canes near the door.  Another pushes past Leonard, while the last man shoves Leonard down and locks the door behind them.

“Vanya, run!” Leonard shouts.  The figure closest to him takes another swing, which Leonard ducks.  “I swear, I don’t know how they found you here.  Only – only your family knows that we know each other.”

Should she run or try to help with her powers?  As Vanya stands paralyzed with indecision, the world seems to go fuzzy around her and she suddenly feels unsteady on her feet.  Is it the shock?  It doesn’t feel like shock – she’s felt that before, and for worse things – but there’s no other reason why her balance and her vision are both shifting like she’s on a carousel with no solid grip.  Weirdly, the too-sweet taste of Leonard’s baking fills her mouth again.  It feels wrong, though she’s not sure why.

One of the assailants is moving towards her, but behind him, Vanya can see the other two figures hitting Leonard.  “Stop,” she says woozily, stumbling towards them.  “Don’t hurt him.”  Everything sounds like it’s coming to her from down a long tunnel.

The broadest attacker grabs her arm and she jerks back instinctively.  His grip remains firm.  She kicks at him, her skewed sense of balance making it difficult to fight back.  Vanya thinks she gets in one half-decent blow, but then she slips during her step back.  There’s a sharp pain in the back of her head and Vanya gets a brief glimpse of the wooden bench that she’d just bashed her head on before she loses consciousness.

* * *

Five arrives in the living room in a shower of blue sparks.

“Five, you’re back!” Allison exclaims.

“I’d realized that, yes.”  He manages not to stumble as he sets the briefcase down and flops into an armchair.  Surveying the occupied couches around him, Five deduces that they’re in the middle of a household meeting.

“We had to put the investigation on hold,” Luther informs him.  “We think Vanya was abducted this afternoon.”

Five ignores his growing headache.  “I’ve been gone for less than two days.  Cha-Cha should still be in police custody with no visitors, and I thought we had a buddy system going anyway.”

“She was taken from rehearsal after a rash of food poisonings.  We haven’t gotten a note yet.”

“We shouldn’t count on one.  Check anyplace that Vanya might have gone first, like her apartment, then check with the hospital and doctor’s offices in the area about whether she showed up with food poisoning.  Then one of you should call Detective Patch.”

Allison raises an eyebrow.  “What about you?”

“I have less than twenty-four hours to track down Harold Jenkins and go through the list of everyone we both know.  Vanya is important, but if I don’t finish my investigation, we’re all going to die in whatever disaster is scheduled for tomorrow.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That food poisoning sure had some suspicious timing, huh? My apologies for another cliffhanger, but things are heating up in preparation for the final chapter. Also, I acknowledge that it’s probably unrealistic for professional musicians to cancel rehearsal the day before a performance, but I did it anyway.
> 
> Thank you all for the responses I got about the previous chapter!!


	10. The Day of the Apocalypse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Buckle up everyone, the finale is just over 7,000 words. Thank you for your patience while I wrote this chapter.

Vanya wakes up with the taste of white chocolate on her tongue.  The room that comes into focus is chilly and unfamiliar.  It looks like a basement of some kind, full of sheet-covered furniture and tall shelves of tools along one wall.  There are drills and glues and a huge stack of two-by-fours in the corner, among an assortment of other supplies.  She also sees her violin case near the door, which is weird, but maybe her assailants hadn’t wanted to leave evidence that she’d been at Imperial Woodwares with –

Wait, assailants.  She suddenly remembers the events at Leonard’s woodshop and immediately tries to move from where she’s seated on the floor, only to realize that her wrists and ankles are tied.

The surface that she’s propped up against begins to move.  “Vanya?  Are you awake?  Thank god.”

Vanya realizes that she is leaned against Leonard’s back.  “I – I’m awake.  Where are we?”

“Not sure.  I don’t remember a lot of being brought down here, just that they wouldn’t tell me who they were.”

“Did any of them have a briefcase?”

“What?  No, none of them had a briefcase.”

So, it may not be the Commission, then.  That’s almost more frightening, because Vanya has no idea who else would be targeting her right now.  “Any other clues?”

“They knew about your powers.  I heard one of them specifically order the others to keep your violin out of reach because of your sound thing.”  The Commission doesn’t know about her powers.  At least, she doesn’t think so.  How could they?  Vanya and her family had only learned about them this week.  “Other than your family and me, who have you told?”

Luther and Diego hadn’t even wanted to tell _her_ , let alone other people.  And her siblings aren’t superheroes anymore, so there had been no reason to announce her extraordinary abilities.  “No one else,” she says softly.

“Oh, Vanya, I’m so sorry.”  Leonard is thinking it too, then: only her siblings could have known to keep her away from manipulating sound, and only her siblings had discussed whether they should keep her from using her abilities.  “I know you said that they’ve been better to you the past couple of days, with everyone working in pairs for safety.  I had truly hoped that maybe you’d turned a corner for the better in your relationship with them.  But now, I don’t think you can give them any more chances.  It’s not fair to you.  You deserve so much better than to be treated terribly by people who have never understood you.”

Vanya isn’t angry.  She’s too tired for that.  Honestly, she can’t even say that she’s surprised, after everything she went through growing up at the Umbrella Academy.  Always excluded, never good enough.  Her chest hurts, though, because she’d thought that maybe her siblings were past this.  There were moments these last few days where she had almost felt like part of the team, watching out for the Commission and searching for the cause of the apocalypse.  They used the buddy system and they were all staying at the Academy, like they used to.  Even if they didn’t get along, they were still a family unit.

No, Vanya isn’t angry.  She’s heartbroken.

* * *

Allison is only half-listening to the radio in Diego’s car as she pulls out of the fifth doctor’s office of the day.  There had been no record of Vanya checking in, so she scans her list for the next office.

“ _– and people are reporting strange weather patterns over the Icarus Theater, heavy clouds that seemed to form just above it.  There appears to be some precipitation, but no word on whether there’s actually a danger from this extraordinary occurrence._ ”

An extraordinary storm.  The Icarus Theater.

Allison parks her car illegally and fumbles out a few quarters for the closest payphone.  The others need to know where Vanya is, where she _has_ to be.

* * *

Klaus and Dave are in the lobby of the police station.  Detective Patch had told them that it was still too early to file a missing persons report for Vanya, but that she’d get them the paperwork if they wanted to fill it out and hold onto it.  If Vanya doesn’t turn up within twenty-four hours, they can turn it in.

There’s a small television above the reception desk and Klaus watches it idly while they wait for the paperwork.  Suddenly, the news anchor switches over to a special weather report.  “ _The abnormal rainclouds gathering in the downtown area have been growing steadily darker.  Meteorologists are completely baffled by this anomaly, and I’m now being told that it’s starting to thunder in the area._ ”

The camera switches to a video feed of large clouds gathering over the city at an almost supernatural rate.  “Shit, Five’s apocalypse is today.  I totally forgot.  We have to get down there.”  Klaus takes Dave’s hand and starts pull him towards the front door.

“ _If you’re going to be near the Icarus Theater today, folks, you might want to bring an umbrella_.”

* * *

The Hargreeves, minus Vanya and plus Dave, all meet up outside the Icarus Theater beneath the overhang.  “It has to be her,” Allison says while Five shivers and tries to wring out his soaked jacket.  “God, I can’t believe we didn’t search the theater immediately.  The staff just said that everyone had left for the night and we believed them.”  Five doesn’t think the theater staff are in on some nefarious plot, but it’s possible that someone had overlooked a few places when they were closing up the auditorium.

“More importantly, how are we going to deal with the storm?” Diego asks.  “That is, how do we stop Vanya?  If she’s gathered this much momentum in just the time it took us all to get here, then how much worse will it get if she gets even angrier?”

Allison shoots him a glare.  “That’s not our biggest priority right now.  If she’s in trouble, then getting her away from the Commission will only help things.”

“The two of you are making a big assumption that this is Vanya’s powers,” Five observes.  “You _do_ remember that there’s an apocalypse on, right?  _I’m_ here because someone connected to Harold Jenkins is about to cause a global disaster, and this freak storm could be the prelude to something much bigger.”

Luther speaks up.  “Five’s right.  We have to search the theater in case it’s ground zero for a disaster.  We’re still not actually sure that Vanya was abducted.  For all we know, she’s recovering from food poisoning somewhere that we haven’t thought to look yet.”

Food poisoning, poisoned food – that nudges at something that’s been bothering Five.  “Oh, damn it.”  He starts rummaging through his pockets and pulls out a handful of candies, his dread rising at what he might find.  He unwraps one to find a small device with a blinking green light.  “Ugh, that’s how they kept finding me.”  He shouldn’t have gone to that stupid lunch with the Handler.  He drops the candies to the ground and crushes them underfoot.  “Yeah, let’s split up and search the place.”

“The key word here is subtle,” says Luther, who has never been subtle in his life.  “People are already showing up for the performance, rainstorm or not.”  He gestures to the steady trickle of people approaching the theater doors.  “We can’t cause a panic, especially since we don’t even know if there’s something bad going on.”

Klaus snorts.  “What, you mean we can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater?”

“Klaus, don’t even think about it.  Now, let’s divide up who’s going where.”

* * *

Tears sting Vanya’s eyes.  She’s struggling not to feel disappointed and lonely and sad all at once.  All she can hear is her heartbeat ringing in her ears and she can’t even wipe her tears away with these _stupid_ restraints.

Except she also feels something strange building in her chest, threatening to overflow and consume her, and then she hears a loud snap.  The tension in the rope disappears.  Surprised, Vanya brings her arms forward to see that the rope is still around her wrist, but there’s a line down the center that cuts clean through.  Had she just used her new power without thinking?  That’s the only thing that makes sense, but the pressure in her chest is still there.

“Leonard, I did it, I snapped the ropes.”

“You what?”  Something in Leonard’s voice sounds strange, but Vanya brushes it aside.

She quickly unknots the ropes around her feet and then crawls around Leonard to do the same for him.  When she comes face to face with him, though, she freezes.  One side of his face is covered in bandages.  It looks like… “Are you missing an eye?”

“Those mercenaries didn’t go easy on me,” Leonard explains with a faint smile, like he’s trying to stay positive for her.  “I’ll need to find a replacement.  Some kind of prosthetic.”

A prosthetic eye.  Vanya is suddenly, intensely reminded of the fact that Five has been tracing the owner of a prosthetic eye all week in hope of stopping the apocalypse.  It hadn’t been sold the last time she’d heard about it, which meant that the owner may not have lost their eye yet.  What could Leonard have to do with the apocalypse?

She racks her memory for everything that Five had said about the eye.  First, it had come from MeriTech, the company he’d been monitoring since he returned.  Second, he’d picked it up when he’d first appeared in the post-apocalyptic world and found everything in rubble.  Third, Five had gone to the Academy and found it clutched in Luther’s hand, still bloody.

Her heart drops.  Is Leonard somehow responsible for what had happened?  For what might still happen?  She considers whether anything strange or suspicious had occurred while she was with him.  The self-deprecating part of her immediately points out that it was weird for him to enjoy being around her at all, but Vanya pushes that thought away.  He’d been an average student, nothing odd there.  He certainly hadn’t been pretending to be a beginner with the violin.  During their first meeting, he’d invited her to his house, which was unexpected, but she’d brushed that off as a well-intentioned offer, since her apartment had been unavailable at the time.  The second time they’d met up, Leonard had been waiting for her outside the Academy.

Vanya pauses.  That _had_ been peculiar.  She hadn’t told him that she was staying at the Umbrella Academy or given him that address.

Were there other places he shouldn’t have been?  There was his appearance at the theater yesterday, but the oddness there had been the _when_ rather than the _where_.  Actually, it’s weird that he’s here with her now, given that Vanya had been the target of the assault.  It doesn’t make sense, because the attackers could’ve easily left Leonard in his woodshop.  There had been no way for Leonard to identify them and no way to tell the police where they planned to take Vanya next.  Also, the only reason she and Leonard had been at Imperial Woodwares at the right time (or rather, the wrong time) is that Leonard had suggested it.  She hadn’t been able to call for help because the phone line was out, and she couldn’t have helped using her powers because of that nasty, disorienting feeling that had come over her out of the blue.  In hindsight, it feels a little trap-like.

He couldn’t have predicted all of that, though.  If Leonard was some sort of villain, he could have cut the phone line intentionally and maybe, _maybe_ known when her abductors were going to show up, but he couldn’t end her rehearsal early to get them there.  Additionally, Leonard knows about her powers and he would have expected her to use them.  It’s only by unhappy coincidence that she had felt dizzy.  No, if he had truly been scheming against her, he would have tried to prevent her from using them.  He hadn’t asked her to stop, hadn’t drugged her –

Although Leonard had specifically suggested that she try his homemade baked goods and hadn’t eaten any himself.

“My god,” Vanya breathes.  “You’re the cause of the apocalypse.”

* * *

After they all split up, Diego searches his section of the theater.  A few people pass him, but they all take one look at his outfit and clearly decide that he’s either an actor or not someone they want to bother.  There’s an unmarked door tucked to one side of the room and he approaches it, knife drawn.  He pushes open the door and apparently it’s an exit, because on the other side of the door is a wide alleyway with three dozen figures in gas masks dressed in all black.

He hurriedly shuts the door, but they must have spotted him.  “Shit.”  Maybe they had been still planning their approach out there.  Now, however, they’re going to have to act.  He recognizes their gear from the surveillance footage at Vanya’s apartment building, which doesn’t bode well.  They’re Commission soldiers, and they’re _here_.

Diego flips the lock on the door and moves further into the building, faster this time.

* * *

“What do you have planned?” Vanya demands.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The apocalypse,” she snaps.  “It happens today.  How are you going to do it?”

Leonard shakes his head.  “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Vanya.  I’m not planning the apocalypse.  Where reason would I have for it?”

“Last time, you did something,” she insists, knowing how hysterical she must sound to him.  “That’s why your eye was in the ruins at –” Wait, he’d been at the Umbrella Academy last time, but he isn’t there now.  Had he needed Vanya to give him access to the house?  If so, why?

“Vanya, you don’t sound well.  I’m sure the stress of being abducted on your family’s orders is weighing on you.  Your siblings don’t deserve you, alright?”  His voice is so calm and reasonable that for a moment Vanya is tempted to let go of her suspicion.  “They thought they could keep you from using your powers, but Vanya, you are _so_ much better than them.  It would be so _easy_ for you to destroy the building with a talent like yours.  I bet you could even control it to just devastate the floor above us.”

“What are you talking about?  Destroy the building?”

“Just demolish the headquarters of whoever is holding us for your siblings, and we can leave.  The entire Umbrella Academy might even be up there.  Once they’re dead, you’ll be free.”

But Vanya sees his words for what they are, now: lies, spun like a web to disorient her, to trap her in his grasp like a spider.  Whatever small truths were woven in, whatever compliments he gave, Leonard had had underlying motives for spending time with her from the very beginning.  Which means that _no one_ has ever wanted her for just herself.  Not her family, who grew up caring more about the Umbrella Academy than her, not her coworkers, who ignored any gestures of friendship, not her classmates during her university days or her violin students or even Leonard.  Leonard, who had been kind and sweet but not because he enjoyed her company.  She feels so betrayed, so _used_ by everyone.

It’s devastating.

Rather than screaming or crying, though, her next thought is for her violin, strangely enough.  Without pausing to think about why, Vanya strides towards the door and her violin case.  She flips the clips open and checks that her instrument hadn’t been damaged when the attackers brought her here.  Or rather, when Leonard had probably brought her here, having arranged everything so smoothly that she wouldn’t think to suspect him.  She runs her fingers over her bow and violin, which are thankfully both fine.

“C’mon, Vanya, I know you can do it.  Just untie me.”  Even without his arms for balance, he struggles to his feet.  “Once you destroy the building, we can get out of here.”

“Stop talking.”

“It’ll be fine, you just have to –”

“ _Stop talking_ ,” she repeats, feeling her heartbeat pound in her chest until it’s all she can hear.  She whips around to face him and swings her bow in an arc through the air.  Vanya watches something leave the end of it and feels a release of energy.  The soundwave speeds across the room and cuts Leonard right through the throat.  He’s dead before his body hits the ground.

Shaken, Vanya stuffs her bow back in the case and runs.

She nearly falls twice on the steps up to the basement’s exit, and with effort, she pushes up the trap door.  Vanya stumbles out into the costume storage room of the Icarus Theater and hears the door drop closed behind her.  So, that’s why Leonard had been back here yesterday: setting up for his con.  There’s no one else here now, but the _tick, tick, tick_ of a wall clock draws her attention and she realizes through the haze of her sorrow and fury that the orchestra’s performance is about to start.  Mechanically, she heads for one of the dressing rooms to try and clean herself up.  She’s still wearing her black button-up shirt and slacks from yesterday, but it’s nowhere near formal enough for a performance.

Inside the dressing room, a dozen or so of her coworkers stare at her in alarm.  She can see their mouths moving, but right now she can’t understand the words.  Someone passes her a long suit jacket.  It’s formal and it covers up enough of her to hide that she’s not wearing a dress shirt and tie.  Vanya thinks she murmurs some thanks to the woman.  One of the flautists lends her a comb and Vanya approaches the dressing room mirrors numbly.  She doesn’t recognize the woman in the mirror, whose eyes are a piercing, eerie blue.  Vanya brushes her hair out the best she can and winces at the bruise she can feel on the back of her head.  There might be dried blood there from her fall, but there’s nothing she can do about it now.

The next thing Vanya knows, she’s on stage, her violin and bow in hand.  There’s a wash of chatter from the audience to indicate that people are settling in for the show.  The stage lights are on, just bright enough that she can see her sheet music without being blinded by the glare.  The first song begins, and it’s one that Vanya has a solo for.  She channels all of her wrath and betrayal and despair into her music, because with her medication gone, this is the most deeply she’s ever felt anything.  It hollows her out.  It is the most _seen_ that she’s been in her life and it’s both exhilarating and humbling in a way that doesn’t feel real.

The quiet from the audience is abruptly broken by the house doors being kicked open and dark figures in masks charging in.  Vanya doesn’t stop playing, though, the momentum of her emotions overpowering any logical impulses to scream, run, or feel anything like fear.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the audience and rest of the orchestra.  Terror breaks out around her as the other musicians abandon their chairs and break for either side of the stage.  The soldiers in the balconies and on the floor – paying no mind to the spectators shrieking and scurrying towards the exits – take aim at the stage where Vanya is the only one left.  Despite the danger, she can’t spare enough headspace to care that they’re here.  Now the music is carrying her, rather than the other way around.  Vanya is a conduit for something she can feel but not name, and it feels like she could sink into the song and never come out again.

Suddenly, though, Vanya is not alone: Diego rushes out from stage left.  “Vanya, what the hell are you still doing out here?  The show is over.”  For some reason, it’s a struggle to understand his words, and even after she does, Vanya can’t answer him.  Among the seats, she sees two of the side doors open and Allison and Luther enter from either side of the theater.  With a pop, Five is up on the second level in the box seats.  The audience is gone by now, and after a few moments, the back doors part to reveal Klaus and Dave charging in.  The smallest frisson of worry slips past the fog in her mind.  Had Leonard been right about her siblings planning to block her powers?  His lies had been mixed with truth, and really, she has no idea what the Umbrella Academy would or wouldn’t do to force her hand.

Then, after a long beat that feels like much more than a few seconds, the true reason for their appearance becomes clear.  Diego starts whipping knives off the stage towards the soldiers on the ground level and Five hops between the small balconies, wreaking havoc among the snipers.  Fists raised, Luther charges the closest Commission soldiers and Allison starts barking rumors.  Dave disarms one of the soldiers and Klaus picks up a discarded baton.

No, her siblings are not here to stop here, she realizes as the grip of her haze lessens slightly.  They’re here to save her.

* * *

Klaus stumbles along behind Dave and Ben.  He’s years out of shape for combat and he’s unfortunately more sober than he’s been in – well, he can’t remember how long.  The club in his hand feels woefully inadequate compared to the temporal assassins scattered throughout the theater.  At least Dave seems to be doing a good job disarming anyone who comes close.

“Patrick Swayze,” Ben says suddenly.

“Ben, not the time to push me around again over a briefcase.”

“No, Klaus, do whatever you did before.  Make me real.”  He frowns.  “Or, you know, tangible.  I can stop this.”

“It’s not like flipping a switch.  I don’t know how I did it.  I don’t even know that it was _me_ who did it.”

“You told me to take my best shot, and then I was present enough to move you.  Try it again.”

“ _Ben_.”  Klaus tries not to drown in frustration and misplaced anger.  People assume things about his powers and it’s the worst.  “I can’t.  It’s not _easy_ , okay?  I don’t have any control over my ‘gift’.  I might as well, I don’t know, move a mountain.  I wouldn’t even know how to start.”

“I get it, Klaus.  Of everyone in the world, I’m one of very few people who get it.”  He clears his throat and glances away with a pained look in his eyes.  “Obviously, control wasn’t my strong suit either.”  Klaus can’t really argue with that, since Ben had ended up dead.  “But please, just try.  Let me do something.  I want it to be a long, long time before you all join me here.”

“Well, I can’t blame you there.  I wouldn’t mind a vacation from our family either.”  His levity doesn’t last, though.  Things are looking grim around them, with more soldiers pouring in the longer the fight drags out.  Ben’s power is well-suited for multiple targets, so Klaus drops the club, curls his hands into fists, and concentrates.  He pushes aside the memories of Dad’s instructions and his nights in the crypt.  Instead, he pulls on every moment where he’d wished Ben was alive again.  It’s silly and childish, because there’s no way he can do this impossible thing, but after several minutes, Klaus starts to feel a chill up his spine and through the rest of his body.  It’s like someone dipped his bones in ice water and shoved them back under his skin.

Klaus finally looks up when his fists start to glow blue.  His brother doesn’t look any different to him, but when Ben makes a surprised huff, Dave turns around and seems to focus on the spot where Ben is standing.

“Anytime you feel like doing something,” Klaus grits out, shaking from the effort.

“I’ve got this,” Ben says.

* * *

From the stage, Vanya sees the blue, ghostly form of Ben appear beside Klaus.  He settles into a comfortable, familiar stance and then, without ceremony, unleashes eldritch limbs from his chest.  She tracks their movements as she continues to play, letting the song carry her.  Ben staggers, like he’s having trouble controlling the creatures’ directions, but each tentacle eventually hones in on one of the Commission’s soldiers, dragging them off balance by ankles and arms and twisting them around dangerously.  Would it be enough?  Vanya surveys the rest of the soldiers in the auditorium and honestly isn’t sure if Ben alone can turn the tide.

Her mind still floating on soundwaves, Vanya looks up – not to pray, exactly, because no god has helped her in her thirty years – and sees the grand chandelier suspended from the ceiling.  She glances down to see that Klaus and company are in the back, Allison and Luther have teamed up in the right wing, Diego is still on stage, and Five is up on the balconies.  Vanya inhales deeply and draws on the memory of her pounding heartbeat from just before she’d shut Leonard up for good.  From this far away, she doesn’t know how much damage she’ll do, but this is all she can contribute.  During a rest in the music, she draws her bow in an arc in front of her like she had before, aimed at the chains holding up the light fixture. 

Regrettably, the distance gives her power time to disperse.  She hasn’t practiced enough yet, and her fury at Leonard isn’t as strong as it had been.  The chandelier doesn’t fall, but it swings violently like it’s been struck by an invisible force and Vanya watches as every figure in the theater collapses to the ground.

Delight and terror war within her at the sight, and a strange mist clouds her thoughts again.  Vanya doesn’t stop playing.

* * *

During a brief pause in the music, Five is knocked to the floor by a wave of force.  Fortunately, the soldiers seem to have suffered the same blow.  He’s back on his feet as quickly as he can manage, picking up knives and guns from the soldiers and killing them as efficiently as possible.  In the back row of the largest balcony, a soldier with a briefcase struggles to her feet.  It’s a matter of moments before Five reaches her and slits her throat.  Then, he crouches down to pull the briefcase from her dead hands.  It’s one of the heavy-duty time machines, meant to transport groups of people at a time rather than a two-person Corrections team.  This briefcase is what brought the soldiers here, probably in shifts.  Blue energy fizzles around the briefcase and then dwindles to nothing, damaged from either the invisible force or something during the battle beforehand.

“That means no reinforcements,” Five murmurs.  Good.  Given Five’s sabotage, there’s no way for the Handler to communicate with her team here.  With any luck at all, the Corrections field agents will eventually return to the ashes of the Commission and decide to slip off through time and space to hide.  Like Five, most of the Corrections division hadn’t wanted to work there.  If there are no more briefcases available, then the Handler and her soldiers are stuck.

* * *

Allison knocks out the last of her opponents and turns her eyes to the stage.  Somehow, her sister is the one who’d caused the invisible push with her music, but Allison doesn’t see anything familiar about the woman on the stage.  Something is wrong.  Allison runs up to the lip of the stage and pulls herself up, quickly pushing to her feet and approaching her sister.

“Vanya, can you hear me?” Allison shouts over the music and wind, which is still building and filling the theater to a degree that seems supernatural.  Vanya doesn’t respond, and now that she’s closer, Allison can see the bright, unnatural blue of Vanya’s eyes.  “You can stop, we’re safe now.”  Her words are lost under the sound of the violin, and she can’t get any closer with the strong winds swirling around Vanya.  “Please Vanya, you’re still new to this.  You need to take a break before something happens.”

From somewhere else on the stage, Diego materializes next to her.  “The building is shaking,” he yells at Allison over the noise.  “I can hear the hail pounding on the roof.  Still think that stopping Vanya isn’t our biggest priority?”

Allison sees the throwing knife gripped tightly in Diego’s right hand.  “She’s our sister.”

“It’s her or us,” Diego says simply.

“Give me five minutes.”

“Fine, but not a second longer.”  Diego starts to say something else, but Allison isn’t listening anymore as her mind races to come up with a strategy.  The barrier of wind prevents her from physically snatching the violin out of Vanya’s hands, plus she doesn’t know how this strange, blue-eyed Vanya might react to a perceived attack.  And Vanya can’t hear her over the violin, so neither reason nor rumors will reach her.

Allison racks her memory for what she knows about Vanya’s power.  It’s about the manipulation of sound, controlling it.  So, what can Allison do to make her lose that control and stop the storm?  Allison casts her eyes around the stage, looking for something to use.  There are abandoned music stands and instruments too heavy for their owners to run with.  She doesn’t know how to play any of them.  There’s nothing here that could drown Vanya out.

Then, she looks up into the rafters and sees the microphones hanging down from the truss, and suddenly she has a plan.

Allison hasn’t always been a movie star.  Before she broke into film, she’d taken theater classes and acted in stage productions for a handful of venues around the city.  She _knows_ theaters.  Whipping around, she points at Diego.  “You said five minutes.  Don’t do anything stupid.”  Then, Allison runs for the edge of the stage and she drops down, racing for the side doors.  She locates the stairs to the main balcony and, once up there, finds the auditorium’s sound booth.  The doors are unlocked and open – the technicians must have fled with the audience – and Allison passes Five doing whatever he’s doing and lets herself in.

Audio engineering isn’t something she took classes for, but she knows just enough about sound boards to turn things on and off.  She clicks off the channel labelled for the hanging mics as well as the mics on the podium.  With the booth’s door open, she can hear Vanya’s performance drop in volume, but it’s not enough.  Allison doesn’t know the computer program that the techs were using and she struggles with the interface on the monitor.  She just needs a sound clip.  It doesn’t matter what the sound is, as long as she can put it through to all the speakers.  She needs to drown out Vanya long enough to break whatever trance she’s gone into.

After a few dozen furious clicks, Allison thinks she has a clip lined up.  She flips on the auditorium speakers, cranks the volume up across the board, and presses “play”.  It’s just a generic sound effect of gunshot, not unlike the real ones they’ve been hearing this whole time from the soldiers, but amplified at this volume, it’s a horrible, jarring noise.  Allison watches through the booth’s window as Vanya startles and drops her violin in surprise.  The music cuts off and the howling wind dies around her.

Allison quickly ducks out of the sound booth.  “Five, get us down there.”  For once, her brother obliges without a smart comment, and the two of them pop onto the stage just in time to rush forward and catch Vanya as her legs give out.  Allison’s hearing feels muffled in the wake of so much noise, but she can hear and feel her sister breathing, which releases a tension in Allison’s shoulders that she hadn’t known was there.

When she finally looks up from Vanya and Five, she sees the rest of their siblings around them, all exhausted.  Diego and Luther both look worse for wear from the battle, but the rest are mostly intact.

“Are we done here?” Five asks from Vanya’s other side.  Allison looks to Vanya, who nods wearily.  “Good, let’s leave before the cops show up.  If we’re going to be interrogated and splashed all over the news, I’d like to change clothes and get a decent meal first.”  He doesn’t wait for anyone to reply before walking off stage right, presumably looking for an exit.

* * *

Grace opens the front door before any of them can get their keys out, and she beams.  Pogo had been working to fix her up since the attack on the house, and it looks like he’d finally been satisfied with the results.  “Did you all have a good time at the show?” she asks.  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to support you, Vanya.”

Beside Klaus, Vanya smiles.  “I’ll have other shows, Mom.”

“Of course.”  She surveys them, eyes lingering on their injuries.  “You’d better all come inside.  Luther, Diego, Allison, you three go straight to the infirmary to get those cuts disinfected.  I’ll be up to tend to your other injuries.”  The three of them murmur variations of “yes, Mom” and take the stairs, while Klaus follows Dave into the kitchen for some well-earned snacks.

“So, I had a thought,” Klaus says.  He waits for the “oh no, don’t hurt yourself” comment, which Ben indulges in from his seat further down the table and Dave does not.  In fact, Dave turns in his chair and gives Klaus his full attention.  It’s a nice feeling.  “Reckless time travel is a bad thing, right?”

Slowly, Dave nods.  “Yes, I’d say so.”

“But if you could control it, and it was as easy as pushing a button or three, would you want to?”

Dave smiles.  “I made my choice, Klaus.  I don’t regret coming to the future, and if I had to do it again, I’d still choose this.  Choose you.”

“Yes, I – I’m starting to get that idea.”  Klaus avoids thinking too deeply about his own feelings, because it’s terrifying how much he’s enjoyed the past week.  “The thing is, it’s not an either-or deal.  See, Five knows enough about time machines to program dates and times, right?”

“True, but we don’t have a machine.  The one Five and I used was destroyed, and he said that the Commission’s machine was damaged beyond repair.”

Klaus fidgets.  “Those aren’t… exactly… the only time machines here in 2019.”

From the peanut gallery, Ben pinches the bridge of his nose.  “I’m going to kill you myself and no one will blame me.”

Klaus ignores him and continues, “I… may have taken the one that Hazel and Cha-Cha used to get here.  It’s buried in my closet right now.  You can visit your people living in 1960-whatever if you want.”  Klaus still doesn’t want to use the time machine himself for the reasons that he’d given Ben before, but he’s not enough of a bastard to make that decision for his – whatever Dave is.  Boyfriend, maybe.  Dave is a good man and can make his own choices.

“Oh, Klaus.”  Dave looks at him with such affection.  “You are a wonder.”

“And don’t I know it,” he jokes.

Dave nods as if Klaus had been serious.  “May I kiss you?”

It’s been a long time since someone asked that so softly.  Most of Klaus’ hookups in the recent past have been rushed, focused on sex as the end result.  “Oh.  Yeah, I guess that sounds good, let’s – let’s do that.”

And they do.

* * *

Vanya and Five linger in the foyer while the rest of their family splits off to the infirmary and kitchen.  “The next few weeks are going to be tough,” Vanya says as she hangs up her coworker’s jacket, which had turned white sometime during the performance.  She’ll have to remember to give it back, assuming she isn’t banned from the orchestra.  “I – _we_ made a huge mess of the place.”

Five snorts.  “And here you thought you didn’t fit in with the rest of us.  Welcome to the club.”

On their walk home, Vanya had started to feel normal again (or whatever normal looks like now without the pills she doesn’t need).  The fog that had settled over her mind during the performance has faded into the background.  “What happens now?  There’s all the damage we did, plus the bullet holes from the Commission and what’s left of the soldiers.”

“The old man had money set aside to deal with the fallout of Umbrella Academy bullshit.  Luther’s probably got the keys to that account now.  I wouldn’t mind making up some popcorn and watching him struggle with diplomacy.”

Vanya laughs and the conversation trails off into a comfortable silence.  It doesn’t last long, though, as her thoughts turn to more serious matters.  “I don’t want to be like that again,” she confides.  She doesn’t have to explain what she means.  Vanya has never been terrified of herself before, and for all that she’d argued against being locked up by her siblings, it’s almost tempting now to have the choice taken away from her.  What had happened at the Icarus Theater was much, much bigger than a few broken lightbulbs or a shattered vase.  It’s frighteningly big.

“I can’t promise that you won’t,” Five replies, brutally honest.

She knows.  Vanya remembers the overwhelming rush of feelings, and she can’t guarantee that she’ll snap out of it next time. “If I lose control again on that scale, I need you to stop me.”  She’d seen Five slaughter his way through the soldiers on the balconies and doesn’t doubt that he could do it.  “If it comes to it, would you do that?”  Vanya hates to think it, but if she ever spirals again and cuts ties with her humanity, someone needs to make the call.  Unlike Luther and Diego, Five won’t get hot-headed and charge in self-righteously at the first sign of trouble.  He’s the most practical of her siblings, the most logical, and his assessment will be fairer than either Luther’s or Diego’s.

Five looks at her seriously, and in his eyes she sees all the years he’s lived without the rest of them.  “You figured out what I did for the Commission, then?”  She nods and waits for an answer.  “I don’t want to, Vanya, but I could.”

“I trust you,” she says, and she feels better knowing that someone else is watching out for her too.

“I haven’t promised anything,” he warns.  “I _won’t_ promise anything.”

“I understand.”  Vanya could never promise to kill Five and mean it.  “That said, I don’t _want_ this situation to ever come up again.  I’m going to take some time off from work and focus on control.”  Vanya still has their father’s notebooks, and she’s going to talk to each of her siblings about their experiences.  Maybe their techniques for managing their powers could help her with hers.  “Doing anything else just seems like tempting fate.”

“That’s probably for the best, then.”

“Yeah.  On a related note, I think we successfully averted the end of the world,” she offers, which gets a raised eyebrow from her brother.  Vanya tells him about Leonard’s missing eye and everything else from the past 24 hours, finishing off with the fact that his body is still in the basement under costume storage.  “It happened so fast, Five, but I swear it was an accident.  I just – I hope I can convince the police that it was self-defense, sort of.  I _was_ attacked, after all, and Leonard was behind it.  Detective Patch is going to be difficult to win over, though, what with everything else we’ve been involved in this week.”

“Do you think they’ve found him yet?”

Vanya recalls the absolute chaos of the auditorium and then considers the odds that an officer would open an unassuming trap door in a room that hadn’t been touched by the carnage.  “Probably not.”

“Hmm.  Don’t worry about it then, Vanya.  I’ll take care of it later.”

Her eyebrows jump.  “Are you offering to bury a body for me?” she asks, astonished.

“There are better ways to dispose of a corpse than burial,” he answers, which is ominous and alarming.

Vanya decides that she’s better off not knowing and changes the subject to something lighter.  “What are your plans, now that you’re home and there’s no disaster looming?”

He shrugs.  “Nothing yet.  I’m getting my own apartment around here as soon as things settle down.  I’m glad to be back among civilization, but god knows I can’t live in this house the rest of my life.”

“You have money?”

“I have whatever was in the old man’s will, plus a bank account I opened in 1959.  It’s earned quite a bit since my initial deposit, enough for me to be comfortable.”

“Whoa.  Yes, I’d imagine it has.”  She can’t picture Five just puttering around in his retirement, though, taking up quiet hobbies like stamp collecting or building model ships.  He’d last all of a week before he started looking for something new to study.  “The local college isn’t too far, and some universities offer online classes.”  That might keep him out of trouble once he reaches the upper-level courses.

“Maybe.  I’ll find something,” he declares, nodding more to himself than to her.  “There are plenty of things I never got to experience before, so I’ll start working my way through them now.”

Before they can both reflect on _why_ he’d never gotten those opportunities, Vanya heads off the potential melancholy: “Well, if you’re looking for excitement, you could always come to my next concert,” she deadpans.  “I have it on good authority that my last one was newsworthy.”

Five lets out a surprised bark of laughter, and within moments they’re both sniggering uncontrollably.  “Sure, Vanya.  I’ll come to your next one.”  Five smiles – and it’s not mean, not forced, not bittersweet – and Vanya feels like things are going to get better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In conclusion, if everyone had communicated like normal human beings during canon, the apocalypse would have been averted. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
> 
> I’m genuinely so thankful to everyone who has commented on this story. Your responses mean so much to me :) I hope you enjoyed the final chapter!!

**Author's Note:**

> Hit me up on my [tumblr](http://meridiangrimm.tumblr.com/) if you want to talk about The Umbrella Academy.


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